November 21, 2024

4 thoughts on “It Is Time to Get Serious About Climate Change

  1. Alex,

    Writing up climate change as a left/right issue is not helpful to the solution. Presenting facts well can persuade people. “multi-meter sea rise” is too exaggerated; this won’t happen for centuries.

    Climate engineering should be a last ditch effort, not the first solution to be mentioned. It’s way too risky.

    Why mix in knocks agains TPP and NATO policies? That’s not the subject of your article.

    Nuclear power is a profit-making way to reduce CO2 emissions, as you note Rosatom has undertaken. China is planning to compete with Russia for this business.

    Solar power is somewhat helpful in reducing natural gas burning, but it’s only available ~1/3 the time. And batteries are out-of-sight expensive except in trade-promotion media.

    We can solve the climate crisis with new nuclear power, cheaper than coal, by persuading (first the developing) nations to nuclear power.

    We don’t need more science advancement in the US to benefit from advanced nuclear power. The problem is simply the regulatory bureaucracy and rules to “protect” people from harmless levels of radiation. South Korea builds nuclear power plants (eg for UAE) at 1/3 the US price. Advanced liquid fission power will be 1/3 of that price. Three companies claim new fission energy cheaper than coal. (eg ThorCon).

  2. “witnessing the proliferation and heightened intensity of extreme weather events over the last several years”

    If you were to research climate history, you would find that you are mistaken in your perception.

    Aztec chronicles record great snowfalls and frosts (The Aztec Historia chichimeca tells of a ‘catarro pestilencial’ (pestilence) that came during the unusually cold weather between 1447–1450 AD, followed by a great drought between 1450–1454 AD. The cold had also destroyed the Aztec empire’s annual harvest in Central Mexico.

    In the last century there were hot periods in the 1920’s and 30’s:
    “Many states endured the longest drought of the 20th century. Peak periods were 1930, 1934, 1936, 1939, and 1940. During 1934, dry regions stretched solidly from N.Y. and Pa. across the Great Plains to the Californian coast. A great “dust bowl” covered some 50 million acres in the south-central plains during the winter of 1935–1936.”

    “During the winter of 1935-36, the US shivered through the second coldest winter ever across the nation. St. Louis, Missouri would go for 20 days without an above-zero oF (-18oC) reading. In Minnesota the statewide average temperature between 22 and 26 January was -20.3oF (-29oC).

    “Then in a complete flip, the summer became the hottest on record, as a hot, humid airmass stagnated over the eastern half of the continent during July. Even after seven decades, fifteen state maximum temperature records set during the Summer of 1936 still stand.”

    Paleo-climatic evidence shows that a “mega-drought” in the 16th century wreaked havoc for decades in the lives of the early Spanish and English settlers and American Indians throughout Mexico and North America.

    The tree ring records tell of the worst drought in 1,000 years, with an extended period of dryness lasting 40 years in places. In this case early records from Spanish and English settlements in the Carolinas and Virginia corroborate the paleo-climatic findings.

    “The most striking aspect of the period of American climate, between the 2nd and 16th Centuries, is the incidence, extent, prevalence, duration and severity of droughts, throughout the Americas; particularly – but by no means exclusively – over western and central regions of the Americas.

    These droughts often lasted for a decade or longer and have been dubbed meagadroughts. Two droughts, in California and Patagonia, each lasted for well over 100 years and have been described as epic droughts.

    …ecclesiastical documents from Spain referencing the period 1506 to 1900 in Toledo and Madrid, show that “the most severe droughts were recorded during the period from the end of the 16th Century up until the 18th Century”.

    Dutch records show that the year 1540 was one with an even hotter summer than the heat wave year of 2003. “This Europe-wide heat wave lasted for seven months, harvests were destroyed and thousands of cattle died, leading to wide spread famine and death. The Rhine dried up and it was reported that people could walk upon the Seine riverbed in Paris without getting their feet wet.”

    “Another disaster usually associated with heat waves and droughts was fire, often destroying entire villages or even towns such as Harderwijk in 1503. Wooden houses became tinderboxes, dry peat, forests and undergrowth ignited readily and led to massive wildfires.”

    “By sampling the wood of thousands of ancient trees across Asia, scientists at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory assembled an atlas of past droughts, gauging their relative severity across vast expanses of time and space.

    A new study of tree rings provides the most detailed record yet of at least four epic droughts that have shaken Asia over the last thousand years, from one that may have helped bring down China’s Ming Dynasty in 1644, to another that caused tens of millions of people to starve to death in the late 1870s.

    The tree rings provide additional evidence of a severe drought in China referenced in some historical texts as the worst in five centuries.

    Perhaps the worst drought, the scientists found, was the Victorian-era “Great Drought” of 1876-1878. The effects were felt across the tropics; by some estimates, resulting famines killed up to 30 million people. According to the tree-ring evidence, the effects were especially acute in India, but extended as far away as China and present-day Indonesia.”

    Buckley et al., ‘Climate as a contributing factor in the demise of Angkor, Cambodia’, PNAS, March 2010; doi: 0.1073/pnas.0910827107:

    “The tree rings revealed evidence of a mega-drought lasting three decades—from the 1330s to 1360s– followed by a more severe but shorter drought from the 1400s to 1420s. Written records corroborate the latter drought, which may have been felt as far away as Sri Lanka and central China.

    The study also finds that the droughts were punctuated by several extraordinarily intense rainy seasons that may have damaged Angkor’s hydraulic system.

    In another study, in April 2009, scientists developed an almost year-by-year record of the last 3,000 years of West African climate.

    “In that period, droughts lasting 30 to 60 years were common. Surprisingly, however, these decades-long droughts were dwarfed by much more severe droughts lasting three to four times as long.”

    The list goes on and on, not from so-called denial sites, simply papers that come up in searches of climate history. It is dishonest for scientists to claim that the current summer temperatures are “unprecedented”, when clearly climate extremes have been much worse in the past with a smaller earth population and without the claimed effects of industrial co2.

    To ignore climate history and claim any weather events as evidence of “human induced climate change” is the real denial of science in favour of computer models which cannot even hindcast past climate.

  3. Emphasis now should be on Resilience, instead of debating with those who have problems accepting the facts of Climate Change. A carbon-fee-and-dividend solution offered by the Citizens’ Climate Lobby is a reasonable means of reducing the rate of atmospheric pollution. Climate Change inertia guarantees many years, perhaps centuries, of climate imbalance and demands long-term solutions, an ecological undertaking the size of which we are just beginning to comprehend.

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