By the Time You Notice Climate Change, It's Too Late
Signs of increasing awareness of climate change and its impacts on our daily lives may seem encouraging, but once it begins to manifest, it is too late to stop.
A murder victim’s body, exposed by historically low water levels in Lake Mead
A recent study revealed that a substantial majority of Americans’ lives have already been impacted by climate-induced natural disasters:
Americans are changing their views on the need for climate change action as severe weather events caused by global warming are landing in their backyards with more frequency, according to a new report.
The vast majority of adults in the U.S. have reported being personally affected by extreme weather events in recent years, according to new research released Tuesday by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Of the more than 2,600 Americans polled earlier this year, 78% reported experiencing severe events -- such as heat waves, freezing cold temperatures, hurricanes, major flooding and wildfires -- in the past five years.
Of the group that reported being personally affected by severe weather, 24% reported experiencing serious health problems as a result of those extreme weather events, with 51% being of Native American descent, 31% Latino, 30% Asian, 29% Black and 18% white, according to the report.
The research shows that communities of color, lower-income communities and residents in rural areas feel the harmful effects of extreme weather and climate change "first and worst," epidemiologist Alonzo Plough, vicepresident of research, evaluation and learning at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, told ABC News.
The last two paragraphs hold the key to explaining why action on climate change has been essentially nonexistent: those harmed most significantly and before anyone else are mostly non-white and poor. In more ways than one, the Covid pandemic has been a useful test case for climate change, and our inaction on that front was motivated by a similar disregard for the marginalized: it mainly killed the elderly, the immunocompromised, and disproportionately harmed people of color. As a result of our blindness to their suffering, it is now an inextinguishable part of everyone’s daily lives, and we are expected to suffer repeat infections, long Covid complications, and consequently damaged livelihoods for the foreseeable future. Covid is now “endemic” in the same way that climate change is “unavoidable,” both statuses foisted on the public with an air of misplaced relief and parental firmness. Similarly, environmental catastrophes overwhelmingly visited upon unseen communities will very soon come for us all, and will be portrayed by the media as “something we(the non-rich) will just have to get used to.”
Hurricane Katrina’s devastation in 2005 is an instructive example here. The world turned a blind eye to the suffering of the city’s predominantly-black residents as racist gangs brutalized the community in the lawless, chaotic aftermath and government assistance languished, with horrifying scars still visible in the area 17 years later. But the weapon of callous disregard is an unwieldy one, and precedents set during that catastrophe can be wielded against other communities with ease, especially given the strain on resources climate change will accelerate along with the increasing likelihood of natural disasters. Hurricanes in the future will be both more powerful and more numerous, promising to put Katrina’s devastation to shame and test the limits of our tolerance for human suffering. This is why the rich propagandists are setting out to dehumanize anyone they deem unworthy: so that when the time comes, fewer tears are shed over their predicament, and if the disaster comes to the elites, they will be fawningly characterized as “job creators” and “philanthropists” whose occasional acts of charity warrant special consideration.
Another example of our “out of sight, out of mind” attitude toward climate victims, nearly one fifth of Bangladeshis are in imminent danger of being turned into refugees:
Last month, a pre-monsoon flash flood, triggered by an onrush of waters from upstream India’s northeastern states, hit Bangladesh’s northern and northeastern regions, destroying crops and damaging homes and road network.
Bangladesh was only recovering from that shock, when this year’s monsoon set in only a few days ago bringing fresh rains that have flooded the same regions again.
A nation of 160 million people, Bangladesh is low-lying and faces threats of climate-change-related natural disasters such as floods and cyclones. According to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, about 17 percent of people in Bangladesh would need to be relocated over the next decade or so if global warming persists at the present rate.
It is not only humans who are ignored—other living things on the planet are even more voiceless, to their detriment:
The results of a long-term international study published in Nature on May 18th, 2022 show that tropical trees in Australia’s rainforests have been dying at a rate twice as high as before since the 1980s, presumably due to climate impacts. According to this study, as the drying effect of the environment has increased due to global warming, the mortality rates of tropical trees have doubled over the last 35 years.
Deterioration of such forests decreases biomass and carbon storage, making it harder to adhere to the Paris Agreement’s requirement to keep global peak temperatures well below the goal of 2 °C. The current study, headed by experts from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center and Oxford University, as well as the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development (IRD), has analyzed very extensive data records from Australia’s rainforests.
It finds that average tree death rates in these woods have more than doubled over the last four decades. Researchers discovered that trees are living around half as long, which is consistent across species and sites across the region. According to the researchers, the effects may be observed as far back as the 1980s.
Dr. David Bauman, a tropical forest ecologist at Smithsonian, Oxford, and IRD, and lead author of the study maintains, “It was a shock to detect such a marked increase in tree mortality, let alone a trend consistent across the diversity of species and sites we studied. A sustained doubling of mortality risk would imply the carbon stored in trees returns twice as fast to the atmosphere.”
How much of an issue would climate change be if it was in the process of slashing human life expectancy to around 40 years of age? Worse, the trees sequester carbon, so their shorter lifespan does damage to the environment; human life expectancy being significantly reduced would actually help it. There is no conceivable silver lining to early tree mortality.
Lake Mead will drop nearly 30 feet from its current level by September of 2023 if forecasts released Thursday are accurate.
The Bureau of Reclamation expects the lake to hit 1,014.86 feet, plunging 9 feet below projections that were released only last month.
It’s been less than a year since the federal government declared a water shortage in the Southwest. That came on Aug. 11, 2021. Lake Mead was at 1067.80 feet that day. Today, the lake is at 1,044.93 feet.
The forecast comes out as water officials from several Southwest U.S. states meet in Colorado, and the current agreement on how water is shared is set to expire in 2026. So far, there’s no sign that states are happy with the current terms of the deal.
Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille C. Touton told a U.S. Senate committee on Tuesday that states will need to cut usage between 2 and 4 million acre-feet in 2023 to protect the Lake Mead and Lake Powell reservoirs.
The rate the lake level is dropping is enough to put a scare into anyone who is watching it closely. Over the past four months, Lake Mead has dropped by 22.14 feet. Over the same four-month span last year, it only dropped 16.23 feet. That means the lake level has dropped an average of 2.16 inches every day since mid-February.
Seven western US states are now being asked to drastically curtail their use of water due to these droughts:
The latest projections from the federal government show that absent large shifts in water use, the reservoirs are expected to continue dropping over the next two years.
Lake Powell, on the Utah-Arizona border, is forecast to decline more than 30 feet by March, putting the water level about 16 feet from the point at which Glen Canyon Dam would no longer generate electricity. Last year, the dam generated enough electricity to fully supply the energy needs of more than 300,000 average homes, with power flowing onto the grid to supply states from Nevada to Colorado.
The surface of Lake Mead, the country’s largest reservoir, now stands at 1,045 feet above sea level. It’s forecast to drop more than 26 feet by July 2023. If Lake Mead were to keep dropping, the level would eventually approach a danger zone at 895 feet, below which water would no longer pass through Hoover Dam to supply California, Arizona and Mexico — a level known as “dead pool.”
Trujillo said she remains optimistic “that we can get through this.” But she also said it’s a “very, very sobering situation.”
The Colorado River begins in the Rocky Mountains and is a vital source for about 40 million people and farmlands from Wyoming to Southern California. The Colorado has long been heavily overused, with so much water diverted to supply farms and cities that the river’s delta in Mexico dried up decades ago, leaving only small wetlands.
The flow of the Colorado has declined nearly 20% since 2000. Scientists estimate that about half the decrease in runoff in the watershed has been caused by higher temperatures linked to global warming. And this heat-driven drying, which scientists describe as “aridification,” is projected to worsen as temperatures continue to climb.
The amount of runoff flowing into Lake Powell this year is estimated to be just 59% of average.
“We are facing the growing reality that water supplies for agriculture, fisheries, ecosystems, industry and cities are no longer stable due to climate change,” Trujillo said.
Who will suffer the most under these new water guidelines? The same who would have suffered the most if the reservoirs were allowed to run out. The same who will continue to suffer, albeit to a lesser degree, if responsible water management is achieved before the reservoirs reach catastrophically low levels.
Even personal encounters with climate change are often not enough to convince some of its victims, thanks to the powerful human tendency to view calamities as flukes which could certainly never happen again. To some degree, any event outside the norm is in fact a fluke, but climate change and environmental misuse promises to make them a startlingly regular occurrence. From the first article linked above:
Also among the households that experienced extreme weather events in recent years, 37% reported now seeing climate change in the U.S. as a "crisis" and 40% now see it as a "major problem."
The polling shows that Americans who have personally experienced the effects of climate change support government action to combat global warming at higher rates, including enacting policies for stricter federal fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks, regulations to make the electricity grid more resistant to extreme weather, increased state government spending to prepare for future weather disasters and lower support for the federal government allowing more oil drilling aimed to lower future gas prices, according to the report.
Those who were in the greatest position to thwart or meaningfully ameliorate the effects of climate change are also the last who will be harmed by it, and by the time it enters their lives, it will be too late for even their best efforts to substantially alleviate our collective suffering. Climate change is akin to a cancerous tumor whose discovery only occurs once it has reached a sufficient size to be life threatening, or a wound severe enough to require stitches that is only covered by bandage after bandage. In the meantime, climate news continues to be characterized as “worse than expected” and “sooner than anticipated,” a by-now rote and suspiciously lazy pronouncement that might be better understood as “starting to have an impact on important people, rather than those we are able to comfortably ignore.”
The racism and prejudice on display in our climate calculus, while superficially limited in its harmful scope to its explicit targets, will in this case doom us all. The irony that capital’s externalities onto poor nations and the marginalized within rich ones will inevitably lead to collective punishment on a never before witnessed scale is little comfort to those who are dying and losing their livelihoods now, but similarly to our short-sighted inability to think in larger scales, our blindness to the plight of the most vulnerable will lead to repeated Covids, repeated Katrinas, and repeated Uvalde shootings which will eventually reach someone even the most self-centered and comfortable white Americans might care about. When this happens, if our current trajectory is any indication, only some of them will recognize the folly of their previous disregard and instead further blame outgroups as social breakdown increases their misery and their vulnerability to fascist propaganda along with it. Rather than understand that their lack of focus on ensuring everyone had a right to life is now coming home to roost, they will manufacture an issue such as a caravan or flotilla of migrants coming to take over, who must be turned away even if some or all will drown, because this will send a message to the rest not to come, or who must be denied life-saving water jugs placed by good Samaritans throughout the US-Mexico border crossing because the desiccated corpses of would-be climate refugees (who were only trying to escape environmental conditions the US imposed upon them to begin with) might cause some to turn back rather than try their own luck at finding a better life.
What difference would their (essentially posthumous) realization of the error of their ways make anyway? It is already too late for the worst damages of environmental breakdown and degradation to be avoided, and the suffering is already upon us—it is only thus far invisible to the elites because they, and everyone they care about it, are privileged enough to avoid drowning in a flash flood, getting killed in post-disaster violence, dying in a heatwave, or giving up on living due to the inability to afford medical care. There is some poetic justice that our inborn avarice and shortsightedness led to both the system bringing about our undoing and our blindness to it, but it will be a hollow justice with no one around to appreciate it.
