NASA - It's Going to be Bad, But We Can Still Make It So Much Worse

  


NASA is predicting more extreme weather events, more and hotter heat waves, more intense rainfall, more coastal floodings - pretty much the worst year we've endured, only worse. And the US space agency says last summer in British Columbia was the canary in the mine.


In an interview with Global News’ Jackson Proskow, Gavin Schmidt, Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies said that the world has reached a plateau of warming that’s actually part of an ongoing continued warming. This is because of the increases in greenhouse gases, notably carbon dioxide and methane, he said.

“We’re seeing global warming…having impacts directly on weather extremes (as shown by) the heat waves in Western Canada last summer, changes in coastal flooding, and changes in intense precipitation,” said Schmidt.

Out of the frying pan and into the fire. Last February was North America's coldest since 1994 and then, well.

Overall, the February 2021 temperature departure for North America was -1.34 C (-2.41 F) — North America’s coldest February since 1994, according to the NASA report on how a warmer climate has impacted the weather.

According to the Government of Canada, the Prairies had maximum temperatures that were as high as -34.0 C (-29.2 F) and nighttime wind chills between -45 C to -55 C (-49 F to -67.0 F), setting many new record temperatures going back 50 years.

“The extreme cold temperatures caused ruptures in water mains and cracked rail lines and set records for energy demand,” the report stated.

According to the World Meteorological Organization, Lytton, B.C., set a new national maximum temperature record for three consecutive days. The latest record was 49.6 C (121.3 F) set on June 29 in 2021, which is a maximum temperature more typical of summer temperatures in the Middle East.

The NASA report stated that “the intense heat was blamed for close to 800 reported deaths and hospitalizations related to the heat across Western Canada. In the U.S., preliminary reports stated that the heat affected crops such as berries and wheat.”

According to Schmidt, the only way to get global warming to slow down is to stop emitting greenhouse gases, notably carbon dioxide.

“We’re not going to go back to the temperatures that we had in the 1980s. That ship has pretty much sailed, but we can stop making it worse,” said Schmidt.

Authors of our own misfortune. 

“One piece of science that’s helpful and I think gives us a little bit of hope is that…the increases in temperatures that we may see are almost entirely due to the future emissions that we’re going to make…so we are in control of our destiny,” said Schmidt.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Navigating the Minefield of Short-Termism

Image
Its disappearance went largely unnoticed. There was no post mortem, no eulogy, no deep sighs for what had been lost. Posterity slipped from our consciousness as we ushered in the neoliberal era 40 years ago. Populations would now be administered, not led. Grand vision was a quaint artifact of generations past. Besides, the invisible hand of the marketplace would see to all our needs today, tomorrow, forever. Politicians grew smaller and smaller until they shrunk to fit the mold of technocracy.  Like sheep being dipped we were plunged into a world of supply-side economics in which lower taxation and deregulation would deliver manna from heaven. We focused on skinning the economy, and society, right to the bone. Everything would be maximized, nothing would be wasted, not even the offal.  We were surrendered to a world of short-termism. We elected governments of technocrats - grey suits stuffed with wet cardboard - whose horizons were measured in electoral cycles. They would do what they
Read more

The Gun We Point at Our Own Heads

Image
  If you're sitting at a table and there's a loaded pistol in front of you, do you pick it up and point it at your own head?  Probably not, unless something has gone terribly, terribly wrong. How would you feel if someone else was holding that pistol to your head? But there is a pistol pointed at our heads and, unless we do something about it, we're goners. It's not a Glock. It's fossil fuels and the industry is slowly squeezing the trigger. Proven fossil fuel reserves are sufficient to generate 3.5 trillion tons of greenhouse gas emissions .  Russia and the United States each have massive reserves of fossil energy sufficient to push humanity through the 1.5C heating limit, sometimes called the "carbon budget."  I have it on reliable authority that Washington and the Kremlin aren't getting along very well these days. After all, if you won't hold the line on nuclear proliferation, you might not be inclined to voluntarily give up a major source of na
Read more

The Cognoscenti Syndrome

  There is a group of people I think of as the Cognoscenti, people who are well educated, very informed and of rapidly diminishing relevance. Their ranks include writers such as Chris Hedges and Glen Greenwald. These are people who have honed an almost Puritanical value system, readily finding fault in any direction. They are scathing in their attacks on Republicans and Democrats alike to the point where they become nihilists. They don't endorse. They prescribe. This is where they fail. They're unable to advocate for anything that might resonate with the public whose interests they argue are being trammeled. Donald Trump was bad but Joe Biden is scarcely better. This is where their elitism comes in.  74 million may have voted for Trump but, hey, they didn't know any better. The mob that stormed the Capitol. They were just victims of the system venting their frustrations. All the racism, bigotry, xenophobia, misogyny, white nationalism - inevitable side effects of their oppr
Read more