Winning Slowly is Losing - and We're Winning Very, Very Slowly

Hot on the heels of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on the rapidly worsening climate breakdown, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has released its State of the Climate Report, 2020.  

Spoiler alert: in many ways, Earth is in worse shape than it's been in human history.  That must come as a shock, eh?

While humanity grappled with the deadliest pandemic in a century, many metrics of the planet’s health showed catastrophic decline in 2020. Average global temperatures rivaled the hottest. Mysterious sources of methane sent atmospheric concentrations of the gas spiking to unprecedented highs. Sea levels were the highest on record; fires ravaged the American West; and locusts swarmed across East Africa.

“It’s a record that keeps playing over and over again,” said Jessica Blunden, a NOAA climate scientist who has co-led “State of the Climate” reports for 11 years. “Things are getting more and more intense every year because emissions are happening every year.”

Sometimes Blunden feels like a doctor whose patient won’t listen to health advice, watching a mild illness morph into a chronic disease. By this point, the patient practically has multiple organ failure, “and still they keep eating those Cheeto puffs,” she said.

While the Covid pandemic saw a temporary drop in CO2 emissions, 2020 brought a major increase in atmospheric methane.

2020 saw the largest annual increase in emissions of methane. The gas only stays in the atmosphere for about a decade but can deliver more than 80 times as much warming as carbon dioxide in that time frame.

The kind of methane that comes from fossil fuel sources disproportionately includes carbon atoms with an extra neutron in their nuclei — a variety, or “isotope,” known as carbon-13. Microbial sources of methane tend to be rich in carbon-12, which lacks the extra neutron and is slightly lighter.

Lately, the proportion of methane carrying the lighter carbon isotope has been rising, suggesting that the recent surge in the greenhouse gas has microbial origins. It might be coming from bacteria in the guts of livestock, or decomposing sludge in landfills.

But the more worrying possibility is that natural methane sources — such as salt marshes, peatlands and mangrove forests — are emitting more as the planet warms. Higher temperatures can boost microbe metabolisms and thaw out permafrost, while rising sea levels may turn some coastal areas into methane-emitting bogs.

“That could be an indication of a climate feedback,” Lan said.

...The litany of broken records was endless.

The far northern town of Verkhoyansk, Russia, notched a high of 100 degrees Fahrenheit — the hottest temperature ever recorded within the Arctic Circle. On the other side of the planet, Esperanza Station broke Antarctica’s temperature record by 2 degrees Fahrenheit, hitting a balmy 64.9 degrees. Death Valley, Calif., may have seen Earth’s highest temperature in almost a century. Europe, Mexico, Japan and the Indian Ocean archipelago of the Seychelles all saw their hottest years. 

And the escalation of extreme weather was devastating.

Super Typhoon Goni was the most powerful storm to make landfall, NOAA said, slamming the Philippines with 195 mph winds. There were so many tropical cyclones in the North Atlantic that meteorologists ran out of letters of the alphabet for naming them; by the time two Category 4 storms hit Nicaragua in a two-week span in November, officials had to use the Greek letters Eta and Iota.

“It’s the extremes that really stand out to me,” Blunden said.

But 2021 already rivals last year’s extremes. This July was the hottest month documented, according to NOAA. The Pacific Northwest was scorched by a heat wave that scientists say was “virtually impossible” without human influence. Floods have deluged China, Germany, the United States and Bangladesh. Drought in Madagascar has pushed the nation to the brink of what the United Nations calls the world’s first climate change famine.

Oh dear, oh well. We're in the midst of an election campaign and not one party has a credible plan to free Canada from our petro-economy. It doesn't matter how dire climate breakdown becomes. With the clock running out, Canada will remain a climate pariah.