The COP26 conference in Glasgow is into its last day of negotiations and deliberations. And as always happens, progress is made on the last day. Usually that means minimal progress. I think that is the correct characterization again.

Today I heard Michael Mann a widely respected climate change scientist say he was optimistic.  That shocked me. He said the Americans and Chinese made an agreement whereby they each committed to do more to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions. That was good. But was it good enough?

According to the United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres “the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius is “on life support” as UN climate talks enter their final days, but he added that “until the last moment, hope should be maintained.”

The youthful protesters outside the conference walls have been protesting the lack of progress. Greta Thunberg said it was just so much “Blah, Blah, Blah.”  That’s what I thought too. I hope Mann is right and she is wrong. I was very pessimistic when I learned the fossil fuel industry had more representatives at the conference than any one country!  No wonder I saw a photo of one of the youthful protesters with a sign that read, “Why is the fossil fuel industry inside?”  That is a pretty good question.

A few years ago already the countries of the world promised to provide $100 billion dollars a year to undeveloped countries to compensate them for damages and losses they incurred as a result of climate change largely brought on by the wealthy countries of the world. So far, despite the promises they have not ponied up with the promised cash. The UN Secretary had the right response to this uncomfortable fact: “promises ring hollow when the fossil fuels industry still receives trillions in subsidies… or when countries are still building coal plants.” Such promises don’t just ring hollow; they stink.  Guterres as right when he said this gap exposed a “glaring injustice.” After all, the undeveloped countries have not caused the global warming, but they have been suffering the most. Not fair! Not helpful!

The reports of the International Panel on Climate Change (‘IPCC’) are written in pretty turgid prose. After all, they must be agreed to by a large panel of scientists who are accustomed to talking in very dry scientific language that each member must agree to.  Then all the member countries must also approve. Some countries like the United States and Saudi Arabia and others are always alert to how they might be criticized so are careful about approving.  Inflammatory language is unlikely to ever get approved.  As Elizabeth Kolbert said in the New Yorker, “The process seemed guaranteed to produce gridlock, and, by many accounts, that was the point of it.” After all, entrenched interests want to remain entrenched. That is why they send delegates to the meetings to ensure that stays that way.

Every 5 or 6 years or so the IPCC updates its reports. The latest report prepared this year just before the meeting of the parties in Glasgow Scotland is not just turgid, but according to Kolbert, “pretty much impenetrable. Still it manages to terrify.” The U.N. Secretary-General was more clear and blunt. He called it a “code red for humanity.” That does not pull any punches.

The report  says it is “unequivocal” that the climate change is caused by humans. It has removed its slight qualifications from early reports such as “highly likely” or words to that effect. Doubt has been removed. Global temperatures are already higher than at any time in the past 125,000 years.

A few days before the report came out the Dixie Fire in northern California became the largest single fire on record. The one last year was bigger but it was made up of several fires that joined up. The day it was issued “two hundred million Americans were under some kind of heat advisory.”

Of course, what did the political leaders do? As Kolbert reported, “As the world fried and boiled, Washington continued to do what it does best, which is argue.” Let me make clear Canada of course was no better,. Politicians have been arguing for decades as the world gets hotter. Kolbert put it this way:

“Every day matters. Three decades have passed since the I.P.C.C. released its first report.  During that time, annual global emissions have nearly doubled and the amount of carbon in the atmosphere put there by humans has more than doubled. As a result, the world is rapidly approaching thresholds that no sane person would want to cross.’

We all wonder what will happen when temperatures continue to rise.  Kolbert said this about that:

“In the carefully vetted formulations of the I.P.C.C. ‘many changes in the climate system become larger in direct relation to increasing global warming.’ In other words, we really don’t want to find out. But unfortunately we are going to.”

Somethings it might be better not to know. The effects of climate increasing by 2ºC are one of them.

The decline of Lake Mead is obvious at first glance. One only has to look at the white bath tub ring in the reservoir which clearly shows where water levels used to be. We saw it clear as day when we were there a couple of years ago.  I took a photograph in 2016 a mere 5 years ago which I showed in a previous post.( https://themeanderer.ca/nature-always-bats-last) When I saw a photo in the Guardian I was shocked how much farther the water level had dropped. It was stunning.

As Oliver Milman reported in the Guardian,

The decline of Lake Mead is apparent even at a cursory glance. The US’s largest reservoir is now barely a third full, the dark basalt rock of its canyon walls blanched by a distinctive white calcium ring where the water level once was. This level has plunged by about 130ft in the past 20 years and is currently receding by about a foot a week as farms hit their peak irrigation period.

A lot of people go to Lake Mead for recreation including boating, fishing and swimming. According to Milman,

“The pace of change has been jarring to the millions of people who regularly boat, fish and swim on the lake, with the National Park Service recently laying down new steel platforms to extend launch ramps that no longer reach the water. Some marinas have been wrenched from their moorings and moved because they have been left marooned in baking sediment.”

Meanwhile Las Vegas, which gets nearly all of its water from Lake Mead, was recently the fastest growing city in the United States. Last year it had a record of 240 days without rain, but it is still growing. Now it has to worry about where it will get its water.

The Colorado River is the source of the water for Lake Mead and it is fed mainly by snow melt from the mountains but that snowmelt has declined by 19% since the 1950s. Because of that, and because so much of the water from the river is siphoned off for lawns, golf courses, drinking water, and above all agriculture in California, the Colorado River rarely reaches the Pacific Ocean anymore. Kayaks have to be carried on shoulders to get there. According to Milman,

“Only 1.8% of the west is not in some level of drought, with California, Arizona, and New Mexico all experiencing their lowest rainfalls on record. Lakes in Arizona are so low they can’t be used to fight the fires spurred by drought.”

Do cities like Las Vegas really make sense in a desert? How about Phoenix? Or Los Angeles? I don’t know what the future will bring, but it is bound to be interesting.

According to Guardian reporter Oliver Milman, the situation at the Hoover dam near Las Vegas is “emblematic of a planet slowly, inexorably overheating. And the catastrophic consequences of the extreme weather this brings.”  Lake Mead that straddles the Arizona and Nevada borders and was created by water backing up from the Hoover Dam, supplies water to 7 western states including my beloved Arizona, is running dry.

Michael Bernardo the river operations manager at the US Bureau of Reclamation, whose job it is to ensure that the reservoir delivers a steady reliable supply of water to nearly 40 million people including tribes from whose lands the river runs and from water is diverted into the reservoir,  said this

“the scarcity of water is out of bounds with historical norms. While there is no “average” year on the Colorado River, Bernardo and his colleagues were always able to estimate its flow within a certain range.

But since 2000, scientists say the river’s flow has dwindled by 20% compared to the previous century’s average. This year is the second driest on record, with the flow into Lake Mead just a quarter of what would be considered normal.”

 

Bernardo also said this when he pointed out how scenarios they had created had never led them to believe the water in the reservoir would reach such low levels:

“These are scenarios that aren’t necessarily where we expect to be in our models We’re getting those years that are at the extreme ends of the bell curve. We’ve seen extremes we haven’t seen before, we now have scenarios that are very, very dry.”

In June this past year the level of Lake Mead (the name given to the artificial reservoir created by the dam), dropped below 1,075ft, the point that will trigger, for the first time, federally mandated cuts in water allocations next year.

As Oliver Milman reported in the Guardian,

 “The Bureau of Reclamation (the government agency originally tasked with “reclaiming” this arid place for a new utopia of farmland and a booming western population), expects this historic low to spiral further, dropping to about 1,048ft by the end of 2022, a shallowness unprecedented since Lake Mead started filling up in the 1930s following Hoover dam’s completion. This will provoke a second, harsher, round of cuts.”

 

Those 7 states and tribes will be facing some harsh realities next year, because of what has already happened this year.  Like many Americans, I had heard for years about the levels of water dropping in Lake Mead, but it never really hit home. Now it has hit home.  This has already happened.  The southwest is committed to this. It has already happened though the consequences won’t be felt until next year. Perhaps some people are still living in FantasyLand. Many of us like to live there.

Kathryn Sorensen, a water policy expert at Arizona State University, my second University I have enjoyed so much the last few years with Chris, made things plain:

“We’ve known this point will arrive because we’ve continued to use more water than the river provides for years,” said Kathryn Sorensen, a water policy expert at Arizona State University. “Things look pretty grim. Humans have always been good at moving water around but right now everyone will need to do what it takes to prevent the system from crashing.”

If the second round of cuts occurs as most now expect, Arizona will lose nearly 1/5^th of the water it gets from the Colorado River, the greatest source of water in Arizona.  Nevada has a lower cut, based on an agreement made between the states and tribes more than a 100 years ago when few people were crazy enough to live there, only gets a small share to start out with. I think Las Vegas gets most of its water from there. It could be in big doo doo (that’s a technical engineering term).

Some people think that this situation is temporary because when people talk about a 20-year drought in the region that sounds like it won’t last for ever.  These people are not taking climate change into consideration. But this is change that has already occurred. As Colby Pellegrino, deputy general manager of resources for the Southern Nevada Water Authority said to the Guardian, “Everyone’s going to have to do more with less, and that’s really going to be challenging for people,” she said. “‘Drought’ suggests to a lot of people something temporary we have to respond to, but this could permanently be the type of flows we see.” Doing “more with less” is not something North Americans (other than indigenous people) are accustomed to.

2021 has been astonishing for many reasons, not just Covid-19.  In fact, Covid-19 might not be the most astonishing thing to have happened this year. We have been experiencing what scientists have been warning us about for at least 3 decades, probably more. Climate change is here, it is bad, and it is real—very real.

There was a glaring example of what the new world, after climate change, will look like and it happened in one of the most unlikely spots namely coastal British Columbia the place that is famous for mild weather far from the extremes.  That was before climate change. Now it is famous for extreme weather. How is that possible? How? Climate change of course.

This summer the tiny town of Lytton B.C.  experienced the hottest temperature in Canada’s history—49.6ºC. Not only that, it shattered the previous record for that area by 7 ºC and  it shattered the Canadian record by 5ºC.  In fact, it defied all computer modelling of how the world might change as emissions rose. It was beyond the most extreme that has been considered possible by scientists.

Much of this was the consequence of something I had never heard of before—a heat dome. A heat dome works like this: hot air is blown in from the ocean and meets existing warm conditions on the land and then the hot air tries to rise, as it usually does, but is trapped and compressed by the atmospheric high pressure above it. The heat that is trapped then intensifies with the “dome” where it diverts the jet stream.   When the heat dome diverts the jet stream to the north that prevents cooler air from coming south and replacing the warm air.

The young climate activist from Sweden Greta Thunberg has been the best spokesman for what is going on. She has described this as an “emergency”. Many people say they agree with her; it is an emergency, but they are not acting that way.

This past year during the Covid-19 pandemic I had an emergency moment. I thought I had Covid-19.  I had a very high fever that did not go away. After waiting awhile I decided to take a brief nap to see if it would go away. It didn’t; it got worse.  Chris drove me to the hospital emergency room. Frankly, I was convinced without doubt that I had Covid-19. Extreme fever was, I had been told, the best sign of Covid-19. When I got to the hospital, I explained to the staff that I thought I had Covid-19. They took seriously what I said.

There was no more waiting in the Emergency Room I was whisked into the emergency ward, I was stripped of my clothes and dignity, forced to change into hospital clothes and was immediately subjected to all kinds of tests, including a test for Covid-19. The hospital team immediately went to work without  delay.

I thought I might die. That thought entered my mind. Later I l my physician said “your fever was so high old men like you do not usually survive such high temperatures as you had.” The staff jumped to the pump and saved my life. I was very grateful.  I may be an old man, but I wanted to live a little longer.

It turned out I did not have Covid-19, but I had pneumonia which at such high temperatures is also very dangerous. It was an emergency and the staff acted like it was an emergency. I was very grateful that the staff treated it like an emergency and did not mouth platitudes.

Greta Thunberg has said we are in a climate emergency. I have not heard any trustworthy person say she is wrong. Yet no one has jumped into action to save the planet in any comparable sense. Why is that? Does no one care? Is it that people don’t really think it is an emergency. By and large it is business as usual with minor adjustments such as changing lightbulbs. By our inaction we are guaranteeing disaster, not for the planet, it will survive, but for much of life on the planet, including human life. It will be disastrous.

Bill Maher, in his own inimical style said it well: “We are in a Thelma and Louise moment, holding hands and driving off the edge of the Grand Canyon.”

Climate change is here. Does any one believe business as usual makes sense?

One of the consequences of climate change according to the scientists is extreme weather. If we have it more often will it still be extreme?

The summer of 2021 was extreme by many standards. One of them was clearly extreme weather. For example, in Canada the record hottest temperature was experienced in British Columbia of all places. And the record was broken by 5ºC.  B.C. had a day where the high temperature reached 46.9 which was 5ºC above the previous Canadian high. Climate models did not even consider such a high temperature. It was literally off the charts for B.C. Scientists have said that such extreme temperatures would be “virtually  impossible” It was caused by what the scientists have called a  “heat dome.”

Europe experienced the year of the deluge. As a result, western Germany and Belgium experienced floods caused by a near stationary low pressure system. As a result 160 people as a result of flooding. In the town of Bad Neuenahr one of the worst hit areas, 98 of the those people died including 12 that died in a home for the disabled. In addition thousands  were rendered homeless as a result of the devastation. The river Erft poured into a gravel quarry triggering a landslide that collapsed houses nearby. The quarry had been expanded in 2015 and in order to get the permit  the owner was required to build a 1.2 km protective wall to prevent the pit from filling with water in he event of a flood. Unfortunately the wall was ineffective to hold off the deluge when the water overflowed higher up the river gushing through a local town. As the Guardian reported, “But the kind of extreme weather events the world is seeing with increasing frequency come with unpredictable consequences.”

In fact, you expand that thought. Climate change is coming with unpredictable consequences. We are conducting a global experiment with our civilization and do not know what the consequences will be. We just know they will be extreme. Extreme weather events bring extreme consequences. We are doing what people have never done before.

The rainfall in nearby Cologne reached 155 mm which was an astonish 60 mm above the previous record.

Records are being broken everywhere. Many of these records are ones we don’t want to break. As the Guardian reported,

“First, more records are being broken more often;  the world’s seven hottest years in recorded history have all come since 2014. Second, scientists can use statistical analysis and computer models to calculate how much more likely particular weather events become as a result of the extra stress people have put on the climate system.  For example, human emissions made the deadly “heat dome” in North America last month at least 150 times more likely and the prolonged heatwave in Siberia last year more than 600 times more probable.”

While I am concentrating on what has already happened—the apocalypse now—such numbers are disturbing. The weather event on the west coast killed an estimated 1 billion marine creatures. The recent spike at Lytton increased the Canadian record for highest temperature in Canada by 5 degrees. Now such events are more than 150 times more likely.  A killing heat wave in Siberia, of all places, is now 600 times more likely.

This has made many people there wonder what the actual costs of climate change will turn out to be. No one knows of course, but the costs will be massive. As the Guardian said, “There is no scientific consensus, but experts are increasingly concerned the world could be in for a bumpier ride than previously thought.”

Once more of these extreme weather events have already happened, there will be more. We will pay more.  Soon extreme weather won’t be extreme anymore.   I don’t know about you, but I don’t like bump rides and don’t need them any bumpier.

I am worried about the future Not my future so much. Frankly, at 72, how many years do I have left? How many good years? Even less. I worry about the future of my grandchildren. I have 4 of them between the ages of 2 and 15. Their future is frightening.

But the present is already bad enough.  British Columbia, long thought of as a province with mild climate, this past year  produced a high of 49.6ºc this year. It now holds the record for the hottest day in Canada. That record was 5ºC above the previous high! During that heat wave an estimated 1 billion marine animals died in the waters off the west coast. This has already happened. It is not in the far distant future.

This year Madagascar had the worst drought in 40 years leaving a million people facing food shortages.  The climate writer David Wallace said this meant it was a “permanent emergency.” That is where we are now.

Yet where is our political will now?  As the Guardian said, “So far, binding commitments to make the cuts in carbon emissions need to avoid temperature rises above 2C are notable by their absence.” The countries of the world are about to meet in Scotland. Will they do any better? I doubt it. I hope I’m wrong.

The Guardian talked about “threats” because it is likely that the computer models are underestimating those threats.  It also warned about “nightmarish possibilities.”

What about nightmarish realities that are already with us?