Alarm Bells

Click on Image for a larger version. Clippings of articles in The Washington Post on 13th July 2023.

Friends, I am writing this just to record my shock and horror at the number of news stories of ever more extreme weather events. And we still have another 6 weeks of ‘summer’ in the Northern Hemisphere.

The clippings above are about weather events in the US, but there are also shocking heat waves in Europe and India.

And yet, there seems to be widespread indifference to what in my opinion is the loud and ominous ringing of alarm bells.

The news that a week in July was the hottest week on Earth for thousands of years, and that the month of June was the hottest month for thousands of years is treated as a curiosity.

It’s as if the increase in temperature of a sensor in a burning building were reported as being ‘anomalously high’ rather than triggering the fire alarm.

Click on Image for a larger version. Estimates of the daily surface air temperature across from the Copernicus climate monitoring system indicate that the week from the 3rd July to 9th July 2023 was the hottest on record and also likely the hottest for thousands of years.

Click on Image for a larger version. Estimates of the average monthly temperature from the Berkley Earth project indicate that  June 2023 was the hottest June on record, and also likely the hottest for thousands of years.

These extreme temperatures are significant not just for the current harm they cause.

What does not seem to be widely appreciated, is that even if humanity eventually achieves ‘net zero’, – something which is decades away on even the most optimistic assumptions – the Earth will not cool. And so what we are experiencing now will become commonplace for centuries to come.

Even if we reach net-zero, the Earth won’t cool.

Really? Even if we achieve ‘net zero’, the Earth will not cool? Yes, that’s our best estimate.

The reasons for this are not simple, but are discussed at length in this Carbon Brief summary. The article summarise the situation thus:

Moreover, temperatures are expected to remain steady rather than dropping for a few centuries after emissions reach zero, meaning that the climate change that has already occurred will be difficult to reverse in the absence of large-scale net negative emissions.

Why? It appears to be a balance of two opposing trends.

• After net-zero, the continued absorption of atmospheric CO2 by the oceans and land will tend to reduce the atmospheric CO2 concentration, which would normally reduce average temperature.
• However, most of the excess heating of Earth has taken place in the oceans, and the atmosphere has not yet reached equilibrium with the oceans. So after net-zero, the moderation of atmospheric  temperatures by the ocean will be less effective, and the atmosphere will warm slightly.

So very roughly, however hot we make the Earth, that’s it: Even if we then emit no carbon dioxide, the Earth won’t cool for a couple of hundred years.

Are you alarmed yet?

After reading these stories I half-expected to find people in the street shocked and stunned. But in fact, eavesdropping on tables in Teddington’s cafés today, I overheard people discussing ‘a week in Sicily‘ here,  ‘flights to New Zealand” there, and then driving off in cars the size of a small bus.

Last year the UK experienced wildfires and a temperature of 40 °C, but even these have not triggered a change of consciousness. Personally I find it a continuing challenge to avoid despair, and to keep focussing on how to prevent things getting less bad than they otherwise might.

Tags: Despair