4,000 acres in one day: “Holy Fire Burns 4,000 Acres, Forcing Evacuations in Orange County,” Fox 5 San Diego, August 6, 2018, https://fox5sandiego.com/2018/08/06/fast-moving-wildfire-forces-evacuations-in-orange-county/.
300-foot eruption of flames: Kirk Mitchell, “Spring Creek Fire ‘Tsunami’ Sweeps over Subdivision, Raising Home Toll to 251,” Denver Post, July 5, 2018.
1.2 million were evacuated: Elaine Lies, “Hundreds of Thousands Evacuated in Japan as ‘Historic Rain’ Falls; Two Dead,” Reuters, July 6, 2018, https://af.reuters.com/article/commoditiesNews/idAFL4N1U21AH.
the evacuation of 2.45 million: “Two Killed, 2.45 Million Evacuated as Super Typhoon Mangkhut Hits Mainland China,” The Times of India, September 16, 2018, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/china/super-typhoon-mangkhut-hits-china-over-2-45-million-people-evacuated/articleshow/65830611.cms.
turning the port city of Wilmington: Patricia Sullivan and Katie Zezima, “Florence Has Made Wilmington, N.C., an Island Cut Off from the Rest of the World,” The Washington Post, September 16, 2018.
hog manure and coal ash: Umair Irfan, “Hog Manure Is Spilling Out of Lagoons Because of Hurricane Florence’s Floods,” Vox, September 21, 2018.
the winds of Florence: Joel Burgess, “Tornadoes in the Wake of Florence Twist Through North Carolina,” Asheville Citizen-Times, September 17, 2018.
Kerala was hit: Hydrology Directorate, Government of India, Study Report: Kerala Floods of August 2018 (September 2018), http://cwc.gov.in/main/downloads/KeralaFloodReport/Rev-0.pdf.
Hawaii’s East Island: Josh Hafner, “Remote Hawaiian Island Vanishes Underwater After Hurricane,” USA Today, October 24, 2018.
deadliest fire in its history: Paige St. John et al., “California Fire: What Started as a Tiny Brush Fire Became the State’s Deadliest Wildfire. Here’s How,” Los Angeles Times, November 18, 2018.
Jerry Brown described: Ruben Vives, Melissa Etehad, and Jaclyn Cosgrove, “Southern California Fire Devastation Is ‘the New Normal,’ Gov. Brown Says,” Los Angeles Times, December 10, 2017.
“angry beast”: “Wallace Broecker: How to Calm an Angry Beast,” CBC News, November 19, 2008, www.cbc.ca/news/technology/wallace-broecker-how-to-calm-an-angry-beast-1.714719.
the fourth evacuation order: County of Santa Barbara, California, evacuation orders from 2018.
temporary shacks: Michael Schwirtz, “Besieged Rohingya Face ‘Crisis Within the Crisis’: Deadly Floods,” The New York Times, February 13, 2018.
More than a dozen died: Phil Helsel, “Body of Mother Found After California Mudslide; Death Toll Rises to 21,” NBC News, January 20, 2018, www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/body-mother-found-after-california-mudslide-death-toll-rises-21-n839546.
1.8 trillion tons of carbon: NASA Science, “Is Arctic Permafrost the ‘Sleeping Giant’ of Climate Change?” NASA, June 24, 2013, https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2013/24jun_permafrost.
thirty-four times as powerful: Environmental Protection Agency, “Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Understanding Global Warming Potentials,” www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/understanding-global-warming-potentials.
climate scientists call “feedbacks”: For a good overview, see Lee R. Kump and Michael E. Mann, Dire Predictions: The Visual Guide to the Findings of the IPCC, 2nd ed. (New York: DK, 2015).
human-triggered avalanches: Melanie J. Froude and David N. Petley, “Global Fatal Landslide Occurrence from 2004 to 2016,” Natural Hazards and Earth Systems Sciences 18 (2018): pp. 2161–81, https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-18-2161-2018.
a whole new kind: Bob Berwyn, “Destructive Flood Risk in U.S. West Could Triple If Climate Change Left Unchecked,” Inside Climate News (August 6, 2018), https://insideclimatenews.org/news/06082018/global-warming-climate-change-floods-california-oroville-dam-scientists.
500,000 poor Latinos: Ellen Wulfhorst, “Overlooked U.S. Border Shantytowns Face Threat of Gathering Storms,” Reuters, June 11, 2018, https://af.reuters.com/article/commoditiesNews/idAFL2N1SO2FZ.
countries with lower GDPs: Andrew D. King and Luke J. Harrington, “The Inequality of Climate Change from 1.5°C to 2°C of Global Warming,” Geophysical Research Letters 45, no. 10 (May 2018): pp. 5030–33, https://doi.org/10.1029/2018GL078430.
trees may simply turn brown: Andrea Thompson, “Drought and Climate Change Could Throw Fall Colors Off Schedule,” Scientific American, November 1, 2016.
coffee plants of Latin America: Pablo Imbach et al., “Coupling of Pollination Services and Coffee Suitability Under Climate Change,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114, no. 39 (September 2017): pp. 10438–42, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1617940114. The paper was summarized by Yale’s E360 this way: “Latin America could lose up to 90 percent of its coffee-growing land by 2050.”
half of the world’s vertebrate animals: WWF, “Living Planet Report 2018,” Aiming Higher (Gland, Switz.: 2018), p. 18, https://wwf.panda.org/knowledge_hub/all_publications/living_planet_report_2018.
the flying insect population declined: Caspar Hallman et al., “More Than 75 Percent Decline over 27 Years in Total Flying Insect Biomass in Protected Areas,” PLOS One 12, no. 10 (October 2017), https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0185809.
delicate dance of flowers and their pollinators: Damian Carrington, “Climate Change Is Disrupting Flower Pollination, Research Shows,” The Guardian, November 6, 2014.
migration patterns of cod: Bob Berwyn, “Fish Species Forecast to Migrate Hundreds of Miles Northward as U.S. Waters Warm,” Inside Climate News, May 16, 2018, https://insideclimatenews.org/news/16052018/fish-species-climate-change-migration-pacific-northwest-alaska-atlantic-gulf-maine-cod-pollock.
hibernation patterns of black bears: Kendra Pierre-Louis, “As Winter Warms, Bears Can’t Sleep, and They’re Getting into Trouble,” The New York Times, May 4, 2018.
whole new class of hybrid species: Moises Velaquez-Manoff, “Should You Fear the Pizzly Bear?” The New York Times Magazine, August 14, 2014.
desertification of the entire Mediterranean: Joel Guiot and Wolfgang Cramer, “Climate Change: The 2015 Paris Agreement Thresholds and Mediterranean Basin Ecosystems,” Science 354, no. 6311 (October 2016): pp. 463–68, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aah5015. According to Guiot and Cramer’s calculations, even staying below two degrees of warming would mean much of the region would become, technically at least, desert.
dust from the Sahara: “Sahara Desert Dust Cloud Blankets Greece in Orange Haze,” Sky News, March 26, 2018, https://news.sky.com/story/sahara-desert-dust-cloud-blankets-greece-in-orange-haze-11305011.
for the Nile to be dramatically drained: “How Climate Change Might Affect the Nile,” The Economist, August 3, 2017.
the Rio Sand: Tom Yulsman, “Drought Turns the Rio Grande into the ‘Rio Sand,’ ” Discover, July 15, 2013.
Eight hundred million in South Asia: Muthukumara Mani et al., “South Asia’s Hotspots: Impacts of Temperature and Precipitation Changes on Living Standards,” World Bank (Washington, D.C., June 2018), p. xi, https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/28723/9781464811555.pdf?sequence=5&isAllowed=y.
fossil capitalism: Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (London: Verso, 2016).
about one percentage point of GDP: Solomon Hsiang et al., “Estimating Economic Damage from Climate Change in the United States,” Science 356, no. 6345 (June 2017): pp. 1362–69, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aal4369.
$20 trillion richer: Marshall Burke et al., “Large Potential Reduction in Economic Damages Under UN Mitigation Targets,” Nature 557 (May 2018): pp. 549–53, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-018-0071-9.
$551 trillion in damages: R. Warren et al., “Risks Associated with Global Warming of 1.5 or 2C,” Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, May 2018, www.tyndall.ac.uk/sites/default/files/publications/briefing_note_risks_warren_r1-1.
pdf.
total worldwide wealth is today: According to Credit Suisse’s Global Wealth Report 2017, total global wealth that year was $280 trillion.
has not topped 5 percent globally: According to the World Bank, the last time was 1976, when global growth was at 5.355 percent. World Bank, “GDP Growth (Annual %),” https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG.
“steady-state economics”: The term was popularized by Herbert Daly, whose anthology Toward a Steady-State Economy (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1973) established a contrarian perspective on the history of economic growth that is especially incisive in an age of climate change. (“The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the reverse.”)
150 million more people: Drew Shindell et al., “Quantified, Localized Health Benefits of Accelerated Carbon Dioxide Emissions Reductions,” Nature Climate Change 8 (March 2018): pp. 291–95, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0108-y.
IPCC raised the stakes: IPCC, Global Warming of 1.5°C: An IPCC Special Report on the Impacts of Global Warming of 1.5°C Above Pre-Industrial Levels and Related Global Greenhouse Gas Emission Pathways, in the Context of Strengthening the Global Response to the Threat of Climate Change, Sustainable Development, and Efforts to Eradicate Poverty (Incheon, Korea, 2018), www.ipcc.ch/report/sr15.
seven million deaths: This is from the World Health Organization’s 2014 assessment, in which air pollution was named as the single biggest health risk in the world: WHO, “Public Health, Environmental and Social Determinants of Health (PHE),” www.who.int/phe/health_topics/outdoorair/databases/en.
whether it’s responsible to have children: For a useful summary of this suddenly pervasive query among Western liberals and a fairly thorough counterargument, see Connor Kilpatrick, “It’s Okay to Have Children,” Jacobin, August 22, 2018.
Paul Hawken has perhaps illustrated: You can find his comprehensive survey of climate solutions (plant-based diets, green roofs, the education of women) in Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming (New York: Penguin, 2017).
Fully half of British emissions: This is probably an overestimate, but it comes from “Less In, More Out,” published by the U.K.’s Green Alliance in 2018.
two-thirds of American energy: Anne Stark, “Americans Used More Clean Energy in 2016,” Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, April 10, 2017, www.llnl.gov/news/americans-used-more-clean-energy-2016.
$5 trillion each year: David Coady et al., “How Large Are Global Fossil Fuel Subsidies?” World Development 91 (March 2017): pp. 11–27, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2016.10.004.
cost the world $26 trillion: The New Climate Economy, “Unlocking the Inclusive Growth Story of the 21st Century: Accelerating Climate Action in Urgent Times” (Washington, D.C.: Global Commission on the Economy and Climate, September 2018), p. 8, https://newclimateeconomy.report/2018.
Americans waste a quarter of their food: Zach Conrad et al., “Relationship Between Food Waste, Diet Quality, and Environmental Sustainability,” PLOS One 13, no. 4 (April 2018), https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0195405.
mining it consumes more electricity: Eric Holthaus, “Bitcoin’s Energy Use Got Studied, and You Libertarian Nerds Look Even Worse than Usual,” Grist, May 17, 2018, https://grist.org/article/bitcoins-energy-use-got-studied-and-you-libertarian-nerds-look-even-worse-than-usual. See also Alex de Vries, “Bitcoin’s Growing Energy Problem,” Cell 2, no. 5 (May 2018): pp. 801–5, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2018.04.016.
Seventy percent of the energy: Nicola Jones, “Waste Heat: Innovators Turn to an Overlooked Renewable Resource,” Yale Environment 360, May 29, 2018. “Today, in the United States, most fossil fuel–burning power plants are about 33 percent efficient,” Jones writes, “while combined heat and power (CHP) plants are typically 60 to 80 percent efficient.”
U.S. carbon emissions: The World Bank estimated the 2014 U.S. carbon emissions per capita at 16.49 metric tons per year; the average citizen of the E.U., that year, was responsible for just 6.379 (so the savings would actually be considerably more than 50 percent). World Bank, “CO2 Emissions (Metric Tons per Capita),” https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC.
global emissions would fall by a third: The richest 10 percent of the world are responsible for about half of all emissions, Oxfam calculated in its “Extreme Carbon Inequality” report of December 2015, available at www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/file_attachments/mb-extreme-carbon-inequality-021215-en.pdf. The average carbon footprint for someone in the global 1 percent, the study found, was 175 times that of someone in the world’s poorest 10 percent.
We have already left behind: Perhaps the most vivid illustration of this is the xkcd web comic “A Timeline of Earth’s Average Temperature,” September 12, 2016, www.xkcd.com/1732.
II. Elements of Chaos
Heat Death
At seven degrees of warming: Steven C. Sherwood and Matthew Huber, “An Adaptability Limit to Climate Change Due to Heat Stress,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107, no. 21 (May 2010): pp. 9552–55, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0913352107.
after a few hours: Ibid. According to Sherwood and Huber, “Periods of net heat storage can be endured, though only for a few hours, and with ample time needed for recovery.”
eleven or twelve degrees Celsius: Ibid. “With 11–12 °C warming, such regions would spread to encompass the majority of the human population as currently distributed,” Sherwood and Huber write. “Eventual warmings of 12 °C are possible from fossil fuel burning.”
at just five degrees: Mark Lynas, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 2008), p. 196.
summer labor of any kind: John P. Dunne et al., “Reductions in Labour Capacity from Heat Stress Under Climate Warming,” Nature Climate Change 3 (February 2013): pp. 563–66, https://doi.org/10.1038/NCLIMATE1827.
New York City would be hotter: Joseph Romm, Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 138.
median projection of over four degrees: IPCC, Climate Change 2014: Synthesis Report, Summary for Policymakers (Geneva, 2014), p. 11, www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg2/.
fiftyfold increase: Romm, Climate Change, p. 41.
five warmest summers in Europe: World Bank, Turn Down the Heat: Why a 4°C Warmer World Must Be Avoided (Washington, D.C., November 2012), p. 13, http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/865571468149107611/pdf/NonAsciiFileName0.pdf.
simply working outdoors: IPCC, Climate Change 2014, p. 15, www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg2/. “By 2100 for RCP8.5, the combination of high temperature and humidity in some areas for parts of the year is expected to compromise common human activities, including growing food and working outdoors.”
cities like Karachi and Kolkata: Tom K. R. Matthews, et al., “Communicating the Deadly Consequences of Global Warming for Human Heat Stress,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114, no. 15 (April 2017): pp. 3861–66, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1617526114. The authors write, of the 2015 summer, “The extraordinary heat had deadly consequences, with over 3,400 fatalities reported across India and Pakistan alone.”
European heat wave of 2003: World Bank, Turn Down the Heat, p. 37, http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/865571468149107611/pdf/NonAsciiFileName0.pdf.
worst weather events in Continental history: William Langewiesche, “How Extreme Heat Could Leave Swaths of the Planet Uninhabitable,” Vanity Fair, August 2017.
a research team led by Ethan Coffel: Ethan Coffel et al., “Temperature and Humidity Based on Projections of a Rapid Rise in Global Heat Stress Exposure During the 21st Century,” Environmental Research Letters 13 (December 2017), https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aaa00e.
the World Bank has estimated: World Bank, Turn Down the Heat, p. 38, http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/865571468149107611/pdf/NonAscii
FileName0.pdf.
Indian summer killed 2,500: IFRC, “India: Heat Wave—Information Bulletin No. 01,” June 11, 1998, www.ifrc.org/docs/appeals/rpts98/in002.pdf.
In 2010, 55,000 died: In Moscow, there were 10,000 ambulance calls each day, and many doctors believed that the official death counts understated the true toll.
according to The Wall Street Journal: Craig Nelson and Ghassan Adan, “Iraqis Boil as Power-Grid Failings Exacerbate Heat Wave,” The Wall Street Journal, August 11, 2016.
700,000 barrels of oil: Ayhan Demirbas et al., “The Cost Analysis of Electric Power Generation in Saudi Arabia,” Energy Sources, Part B 12, no. 6 (March 2017): pp. 591–96, https://doi.org/10.1080/15567249.2016.1248874.
10 percent of global electricity: International Energy Agency, The Future of Cooling: Opportunities for Energy-Efficient Air Conditioning (Paris, 2018), p. 24, www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/The_Future_of_Cooling.pdf.
triple, or perhaps quadruple: Ibid., p. 3.
700 million AC units: Nihar Shah et al., “Benefits of Leapfrogging to Superefficiency and Low Global Warming Potential Refrigerants in Room Air Conditioning,” Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (October 2015), p. 18, http://eta-publications.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/lbnl-1003671.pdf.
more than nine billion cooling appliances: University of Birmingham, A Cool World: Defining the Energy Conundrum of Cooling for All (Birmingham, 2018), p. 3, www.birmingham.ac.uk/Documents/college-eps/energy/Publications/2018-clean-cold-report.pdf.
hajj will become physically impossible: Jeremy S. Pal and Elfatih A. B. Eltahir, “Future Temperature in Southwest Asia Projected to Exceed a Threshold for Human Adaptability,” Nature Climate Change 6 (2016), pp. 197–200, www.nature.com/articles/nclimate2833.
sugarcane region of El Salvador: Oriana Ramirez-Rubio et al., “An Epidemic of Chronic Kidney Disease in Central America: An Overview,” Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 67, no. 1 (September 2012): pp. 1–3, http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/jech-2012-201141.
The Uninhabitable Earth Page 25