Always More, Always Worse, Always Sooner Than Expected
As the human race continues its inexorable march into civilizational collapse, the overarching business as usual attitude is becoming more and more incomprehensible.
A starving polar bear
As argued in several recent climate entries on this Substack (1 2 3 4), environmental news and press releases are strikingly uniform in their characterization of emerging information and research as unexpectedly dire: “worse than expected,” “sooner than anticipated,” and “more than previously thought” are phrases whose commonality is significant. If reports are always worse than expected, it would follow that our expectations should be amended, but thus far they continue to be insufficiently pessimistic. In the last few weeks, more unnerving revelations have emerged that did nothing to change that trend.
A recent Israeli study found that climate-driven storm activity in the Southern Hemisphere has already intensified to a level that was previously predicted to be found only by the 2080s:
The study, which compared previous predictions of human-caused intensification of winter storms in the Southern Hemisphere with current storm observations, found that the “bleak” reality was far worse than expected. …
“One example of this is the role the storms play in regulating the temperature at the Earth’s poles. Winter storms are responsible for the majority of the heat transport away from tropical regions toward the poles,” he said, noting that without their contribution, the average pole temperatures would be about 30°C (54°F) lower.
Chemke also noted the current trends pose “a real and significant threat to societies in the Southern Hemisphere in the next decades.”
The study said it only examined storms in the Southern Hemisphere because the intensification there has so far been stronger than in the north. However, Chemke said that if the trend persists “we will be observing more significant winter storm intensification here in the upcoming years and decades.”
The study also investigated whether these sudden changes could be attributed to natural changes in climate patterns or were caused by external factors such as human activity and found that over the past 20 years, storms have been intensifying faster than can be explained by internal climatic behavior alone, the statement said. …
Still, the research results were alarming, the study said, noting that climate projections for the coming decades are graver than previous assessments, and in this case with dire implications for the Southern Hemisphere.
The oceans are also experiencing significantly more frequent heatwaves (four times the number experienced in the 1980s in the South China Sea) due to global warming:
The authors determine that there is a rapid rise in the occurrence of marine heatwaves in the South China Sea over the past four decades. The severity (frequency-intensity) is comparable to other typical areas, like the Mediterranean and the Tasman Sea.
The marine heatwaves in the South China Sea have caused a devastating impact on marine ecosystems and the services they provide. Despite the growing severity of such heatwaves, the corresponding system for systematic monitoring and forecasting has not been established by governments so far. The increasing severity of marine heatwaves events can bring great risk to marine organisms and ecosystems, especially for organisms such as farmed sea cucumber and coral reefs.
Evidence has shown that temperatures of 2°C above the summer highs are stressful and can be lethal to reef-building corals. Recent marine heatwaves in 2016 in the tropical ocean have caused bleaching of 75% and mortality of 30% of global reefs. With the acceleration of global warming, marine heatwaves are expected to further increase in frequency and intensity and will continue to be the most serious threat to the future of coral reefs. This calls for urgent action and measures against carbon emissions to mitigate global warming.
These changes are already having profound impacts on ocean life, from plankton to corals to farmed salmon:
Up to 42% of company’s fish have died in warm water areas this year, with CEO warning climate change is ‘faster than people think’
New Zealand’s biggest king salmon farmer says it is shutting some of its farms after warming seas prompted mass die-offs of fish, warning that it is a “canary in the coalmine” for climate change.
New Zealand is the world’s largest producer of king, or “chinook” salmon, a highly valued breed which fetches a premium on the world market. The country’s farms account for about 85% of global supply, New Zealand King Salmon chief executive Grant Rosewarne said.
Now, increasingly warm summer seas mean the fish at some sites are dying en masse before they can reach maturity, leaving farmers dumping thousands of tonnes of dead fish into local landfills.
“There should be alarm bells,” Rosewarne said. “When I joined this company, I never heard of the term ‘marine heatwave’…. Recently, there’s been three of them.
“We thought we had more time,” Rosewarne said. “Climate change is a slow process but faster than many people think – certain industries are … canaries in the coalmine.”
“We thought that climate change is a really slow effect, detected over decades – and possibly we’ve got, two decades before we’re even impacted. Well, within one decade we were impacted.”
Climate change is to a large extent a self-accelerating phenomenon—warming unsurprisingly melts ice, for example, but the lack of surface ice reduces reflectiveness (albedo) and causes the waters to absorb more heat and therefore warm even more rapidly. One consequence of such “feedback loops” recently occurred in Greenland, which in 2021 experienced a record melt event. Such events are becoming increasingly common due to climate-intensified atmospheric rivers bringing in warm air currents:
On Aug. 14, 2021, the system drew exceptionally warm and moist air from southern latitudes northward, increasing temperatures around 32 degrees (18 Celsius) higher than normal. Rain, not snow, fell on Greenland’s summit for the first time on record. Melting persisted over the next two weeks, covering 46 percent of the ice sheet. This was the largest melt event to occur so late in the year.
“The weather was atrocious,” said Box, a professor at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland. “I didn’t know that it was as big as it was.”
The “atrocious” weather was caused by a warm, narrow band of water vapor in the sky, known as an atmospheric river. The term “atmospheric river” has recently become popularized in media due to its role in extreme weather. As the plume of water vapor makes landfall, it precipitates as rain or snow. In the fall and winter, atmospheric rivers bring much of California’s annual precipitation but can also unleash intense flooding. In July 2021, an atmospheric river brought flooding to Germany, which killed more than 200 people.
In Greenland, these warm rivers in the sky also play a role in melting the ice sheet. Amid rising temperatures, Greenland has lost more ice mass than it gained for 25 years in a row. In that time, melting ice from Greenland has added about 0.4 inches to sea level rise — equivalent to adding water from 120 million Olympic-size swimming pools each year. If the entire ice sheet were to melt, sea level could increase by more than 20 feet. …
As an atmospheric river landed over Greenland in August, the study found the majority of melt resulted from elevated air temperatures, which darkened the ice sheet surface and increased the absorption of sunlight. Satellite data showed melting snow crept up to higher elevations and exposed relatively dark bare ice. Where snow remained, surface melting deformed the snow crystals and made them darker, which led to additional melting under sunny skies in the following days.
In the western US, a record drought is exacerbating already-dry conditions and causing the largest American reservoir (Lake Mead) to recede so low that weighed down murder victims’ bodies are being exposed:
One was stuffed in a barrel with a gun shot wound - presumably because someone thought it would stay unnoticed at the bottom of the vast reservoir forever.
While the dead bodies are fuelling talk about Las Vegas' mob past, water experts warn of even more worrisome consequences. If the lake keeps receding, it would reach what's known as "dead pool" - a level so low the Hoover Dam would no longer be able to produce hydropower or deliver water downstream. …
Nasa, which monitors changing water levels, is warning that the western United States is now entering one of the worst droughts ever seen.
"With climate change, it seems like the dominoes are beginning to fall," Nasa hydrologist JT Reager told the BBC.
"We get warmer temperatures, we get less precipitation and snow. The reservoirs start drying up, then in a place like the West, we get wildfires".
These consequences are beginning to have "stronger and stronger impacts," Mr Reager said.
"It's like watching this slow motion catastrophe kind of unfold".
Even education is being impacted by climate change. Higher CO2 levels are associated with cognitive impairment, but a different sort of impediment to learning has become common: some districts are sending students home because classrooms are too hot and many lack air conditioning (itself an emitter of greenhouse gasses):
For Principal Richard M. Gordon IV, it was just another early-summer day in the halls of his West Philadelphia high school, where sweltering temperatures, high humidity and a lack of ventilation made classrooms so uncomfortable that students could barely sit still.
“Can I honestly say effective learning is happening in my building? I can’t,” said Gordon, the principal of Paul Robeson High School.
Climate change poses a growing threat to American schools. Regions where extreme heat was once rare — from the Northeast to the Pacific Northwest — now periodically find their buildings unbearably hot as spring turns to summer and again when classes resume in August or September. …
Heat inhibits learning. In a study published in the journal Nature Human Behavior in 2020, researchers found that students scored worse on standardized exams for every additional day of 80-degree or higher temperatures. The study also found that in the United States, being exposed to higher temperatures mainly impaired the learning of Black and Latino students, who are less likely to have air conditioning at school and at home.
Experts say the problem is only becoming worse. The past seven years have, in succession, been the seven hottest years on record. Last summer was tied for the hottest on record with the Dust Bowl year of 1936.
Atmospheric CO2 has only continued to rise despite the glut of damning evidence that it is leading to catastrophic environmental changes—on Friday, NOAA announced that CO2 is at a record high, surpassing the pre-industrial concentration by more than 50%. The response thus far from the American government has been essentially nonexistent, and now, poised to retake the legislature in the upcoming midterms, Republicans are putting forth a climate plan that actually calls for an increase in energy production and explicitly sets no environmental goals, relying instead on the goodwill of the private sector to save us:
The report, however, is also notable in what it does not include. House Republicans continue to resist setting a specific emissions reduction target. They oppose policies to reduce fossil fuel use, including regulations, taxes, or mandates. And Graves said House Republicans, unlike at least some GOP counterparts in the Senate, are skeptical of the government extending and expanding clean energy tax credits that the renewable industry says are critical to helping them deploy zero-carbon power at the scale needed to address climate change.
“Are we open to looking at strategies that nudge technologies to economic sustainability? Yes. But a lot of that can be achieved through R&D partnering with innovators,” said Graves, who represents an oil and gas district experiencing sea level rise and is currently the ranking GOP member of the Democratic-led Select Committee on the Climate Crisis.
In leaning too much into fossil fuels to counter Biden’s more aggressive climate agenda, Republicans risk turning off swing voters in states and districts already feeling the effects of climate change, with forecasts predicting a brutal summer for wildfires, extreme heat and drought.
The definition of insanity is often summarized as the act of repeating the same process and expecting a different outcome each time. The famous quote is misattributed to Einstein, but it is an accurate descriptor of the scientific method, which is based on hypothesizing and testing, then updating models accordingly. If experiments continue to yield a result that is unexpected in the same way each time, then the conclusion would be that some underlying assumptions of the hypothesis are wrong and need to be corrected if a more unified theory is to be formed.
Unless the common phrases from the title of this essay are journalistic embellishment (there is no reason to suspect they are given that mainstream media has an interest in downplaying the severity of environmental crises, not in sensationalizing them), the repeated declarations of surprise at the scope and immediacy of the problem should indicate to climate scientists that they are beginning to see a disconcerting pattern: always worse, always sooner. The recognition that every study and every data point is more dire than predicted should argue for the updating of their models to reflect a clear tendency to underestimate the scope of human-driven climate change and to more carefully consider feedback loops and cascading effects as both products and drivers of change. The question they should be asking themselves: “why is it always much worse than we thought?”
This recognition should also change the way in which the media discusses the ongoing and looming climate catastrophe. Their wording thus far has clearly been insufficiently “alarmist” and therefore obstructionist, reflecting at it does the hidebound status quo that is being maintained by powerful monied interests who will always resist a potential hit to their bottom line. These interests have a staunch ally in both of America’s main political parties, who will be happy to continue putting forth woefully insufficient climate programs such as the Republican energy plan outlined above, all while counting on the media to obfuscate their language with declarations of surprise which might have been believable the first few hundred times but can longer be considered anything but collaboration. The more realist “alarmist” tone might spur governments to begin mitigation efforts in earnest where the more lackadaisical approach had failed—the one thing a fascist government fears is unrest it cannot contain, and the apocalyptic destruction of our very home promises to create many downtrodden, desperate refugees with nothing to lose.
A better rule of thumb when discussion climate change: expect the unexpected. The scope of the issue is almost impossible to fully describe, as it is truly all-encompassing yet touches so many interrelated systems that its scale is both massive and miniscule at once. That we continue to be surprised at its undeniable deadliness is a testament to the weakness of the media in responsibly reporting scientific research and the government’s self-interested hesitance to respond, but also to the mass psychological phenomenon known as denial. Those of us who are as yet lucky enough to be unharmed by climate change and environmental degradation persist in living life as if nothing is happening, only coming to terms with the looming catastrophe when it begins to touch our lives or is so visible elsewhere that we can no longer avert our eyes. Prior to this, we amble on, content in the knowledge that, among other confusing and contradictory media framings, the repeat surprise of scientists can be clung to as evidence that the jury is still out on the realistic potential suffering in our future. It is the ever-comforting seed of doubt, the small chance of survival we cling to in order to convince ourselves that if they (doctors, scientists, investigators, experts of any kind) were wrong once, perhaps they are wrong again. The problem here should be obvious: they are wrong in exactly the same way each time, and it is always in the underestimation of the crisis.
If, on the other hand, news items were suffused with phrases such as “not as bad as previously thought,” we might be able to rest easy. If even a few of them contained realistically better-than-expected outcomes, we could be forgiven for holding on to hope.
The business as usual attitude must change immediately. It will eventually change with or without our consent, but this change will be especially painful, given that it will be accompanied by feelings of guilt and regret that, while we always knew we couldn’t entirely stop the decimation of the biosphere by the year 2022, we could have done much more to diminish its damaging effects on one another. It is time to start erring on the side of caution and realistic pessimism rather than ignorance and optimism.