I had my first hands-on experience with a computer in 1966. That's when I wrote my first computer program. About a decade later I made the then bold prediction that "computers will take over the world". And about a decade after that I opined that "They won. Computers have succeeded in taking over the world". Did I mean that some kind of Skynet AI would be running everything and people would merely be appendages. No! My definition of "taking over" was much more modest.
What I meant was that computers would be so deeply imbedded into society in ways so pivotal and important that society could no longer function without them. At that time a case could perhaps be made that my pronouncement was a bit premature.
But people now organizing all aspects of their lives using a smartphone, a powerful computer wrapped in an attractive package. And much else in our lives now depends on cheap, powerful, and ubiquitous computing happening behind the scenes. So, all doubt as to the truth of my pronouncement is long gone.
In a parallel vein, experts have now been worrying about Global Warming taking over for several decades. As with computers, for a long time it was some sort of vague concern about the future. Bad things were definitely going to start to happen at some point. It is my contention that we have now reached that "some point". The future is now. And that means that Global Warming has, in fact, won.
There is a case to be made that I am premature in making this pronouncement. In fact, the case is stronger for my Global Warming pronouncement being premature than it was with respect to my pronouncement about computers taking over. Nevertheless, I think I got my computer call right back then. And I think I am right in making my Global Warming pronouncement now rather than later.
Back then scientists and other experts were little concerned about whether or not computers were or were not taking over. As a result, they spent little time considering the question and even less time debating a time line. The same can not be said about Global Warming. Scientists have been very concerned about the issue from the start.
And they have spent a lot of time and effort trying to estimate when various milestones would take place. And the consensus position from the start has been that critical milestones will be reached "soon but not yet". Since that initial estimate, when we will hit "soon" is has continued to shrink. "Soon" is now about a decade.
Bill Gates recently published a book on the subject of Global Warming. He does a nice job of laying out the consensus position on how big the problem is. I reviewed the book favorably in a blog post. (See: Sigma 5: How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.) In the book Gates lays out a timeline for what needs to be done and when. If the timeline is followed than Gates opines that a climate disaster will be avoided.
If the Gates plan is followed then all will be well by 2050. In my review I opined that we would be lucky to have everything he lays out implemented by 2100. And Gates tells us that there are things that we need to be doing right now. But we aren't doing them. Worse yet, I don't see any reason to believe that we will start doing them any time soon.
My thinking has tended to track that of scientists and experts, people like Gates. But I have now changed my mind. I did so abruptly. It was as a result of reading the June 8, 2021 edition of the Seattle Times.
It contained a number of disturbing stories, all pointing in the same direction. The stories concerned events that took place far from my home town. So the Seattle Times was not the originator but merely the purveyor of this information. And the information was truly scary.
One story concerned specific instances of prolonged periods of bad weather happening in specific places. The events described were very scary. But what made it even more scary was that they fit into a pattern that has been becoming more and more pronounced. Let's start with the events described in the story.
The story reported on recent extremely high daytime temperatures in the parts of Middle East and in Central Asia. These temperatures often exceeded 125 degrees Fahrenheit. That's considered dangerously hot even for traditionally hot and dry places. The Middle East is known for being hot. But there's hot and there's HOT.
There have always been places where it gets extremely hot. But places known for their extreme heat were desolate places where nobody lives. Death Valley is an example. No one lives there. People don't live in extremely hot places like Death Valley because people can't survive prolonged stays in extremely hot places.
These temperatures were recorded in populated areas, areas known for their heat but not for their extreme heat. But the places in the story that are seeing record breaking temperatures are places that host medium to large populations. Not an oasis but a city or a metropolis. The fact that such large populations have been living there for a long time indicates that they didn't used to feature such extreme temperatures.
One thing I learned from the story is that there is something called the 50 degree club. 50 degrees Celsius equates to 122 degrees Fahrenheit. Most countries never manage a high enough temperature to qualify for membership in the 50 degree club. Five Middle East countries joined the club in the past few days. And in several of them, it wasn't even close.
A few days ago a town in Abu Dhabi hit 51 Celsius (123.8 Fahrenheit). A town in Kuwait hit 50.9 (123.6). A town on an island in Oman, where surrounding water should have moderated things, hit 50.1 (122.2). So did a small town in Pakistan, a country that isn't even in the Middle East. It's in Central Asia, normally a hot but not super-hot region. A day later a town in the UAE hit 51.7 (125.2). But wait, there's more.
As the altitude goes up the temperature goes down. That means cities situated at altitude are cooler, usually much cooler, than otherwise similar cities located near sea level. In spite of this, a town in Iran managed to hit 45.5 (113.9). Not super-hot until you learn that this town is situated at an altitude of over 3,000 feet. A town at altitude in Turkmenistan hit 44.7 (116). A town at altitude in Uzbekistan hit 44.4 (112.5). A balloon launched in Abu Dhabi had to ascend to 5,000 feet before the temperature dropped below 90 degrees Fahrenheit.
These parts of the world are known for being hot. But this is extreme heat. Temperatures are running about 15 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. That's a lot. Closer to home, over the last few days we have seen temperatures ten or more degrees above normal in Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota. Very high temperatures in late July or early August? That would be expected. Extremely high temperatures in early June and in multiple different parts of the world? Something is going on.
If this was all that has been going on I would not be that worried. But there's also this.
The most talked about driver of Global Warming is Carbon Dioxide. The "Greenhouse Effect" that makes Carbon Dioxide important was well understood two hundred years ago. With that in mind, C. David Keeling of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography set out to try to understand what was normal when it came to the level of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere.
The proper way to do this is to take a whole lot of measurements. You want to measure it in a lot of places. And you want to keep measuring it over and over so that you can see how it changes over time. But at the time (1958) measurements of that kind were hard to do. If he was going to be able to do it at all he was going to have to figure out the minimum he could do that would be informative.
He decided that taking the measurement in just one place, if you picked the right place, would have to do. He looked around and decided an astronomical observatory on Mauna Loa mountain in Hawaii was it. There he could measure pure ocean air far from industry or big cities.
And while taking measurements in one place might do, he had to repeat the measurement on a strict schedule. He could manage a twice per day measurement, so that's what he did. Those twice per day measurements from the Mauna Loa observatory continue to this day. Others have started similar programs at various locations scattered around the world. And we now have satellites gathering additional data.
Why did he do it? It was not because he knew what he would find. It was because no one knew what he would find. No one had ever tried to do it before. And there were literally no well established theories capable of predicting what the measurements would show. It only took him a couple of years to learn something interesting.
The level of Carbon Dioxide varies with the season. It is always high at the same time of year (May) and always low at the same time of year (roughly six months later). It didn't take long to figure out that the pattern correlated with industrial activity in the Northern hemisphere. The correlation was obvious in retrospect. But, absent any data, other correlations were plausible.
It took longer for another pattern to emerge. The highs kept getting higher. The lows kept getting higher too. That was surprising. Scientists knew that industrial activity threw Carbon Dioxide into the air. But they also knew that plants pulled it out of the air and turned it into plant matter. It was entirely possible that the two process would balance each other and the average amount of Carbon Dioxide would stay roughly the same.
Initially this was an interesting but not concerning development. Maybe there was a process that played out over a longer time period. Sun spots, for instance, follow an 11 year cycle. Maybe there was something like that going on.
But year after year the trend was up, always up. Various possible mechanisms that would drive levels back down were shown to either not exist or to not be powerful enough to overcome whatever was pushing the levels up.
As the "upward, ever upward" pattern got more pronounced scientists started to worry. It became more and more important to try to get a much more detailed understanding of what was going on. So they delved into every possible mechanism for increasing or decreasing the amount of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere.
They learned a lot. A big volcanic eruption throws a lot of Carbon Dioxide into the air. Various geological processes pull Carbon Dioxide out of the air. But eruptions cause a spike that only lasts a year or so. And geologic activity takes thousands of years to make a difference. As the details got filled in and understanding deepened concern increased. The result was the IPCC.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was founded in 1984 by the World Meteorological Organization, an agency of the U.N. Its job was to consolidate and organize all the scattered efforts to understand climate and climate change. Thousands of scientists contribute. The IPCC periodically issues a report summarizing the current state of the art.
Five "assessments" have been issued. The next one is due next year. The IPCC itself does no research. It collects, evaluates, collates, and consolidates the research of others. Every report includes questions that need more work to answer and areas that are poorly understood. But with each report the level of understanding keeps improving.
Old questions keep getting replaced by new ones as the understanding deepens. The new the questions tend to be more focused. A general understanding leads to questions relating to one or another specific area that is still not well understood. An understanding of larger effects leads to questions about smaller effects.
The picture keeps getting clearer and more detailed. But the improved clarity and detail leaves the overall situation unchanged. The environment is warming up. It is warming at an increasing rate. This warming is causing greater and greater disruptions. More contentious, but only outside scientific circles, is that the evidence that the largest driver of this warming trend is man made activity.
That last conclusion gores many oxen. And many of these oxen are wealthy and powerful. They stand to lose a lot if large mitigation measures are undertaken. They have been pushing back, hard, since before the first IPCC report was issued in 1990. Since the science and the data are solid they tend to depend heavily on FUD: Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.
With that background in place, let me turn to the other story that caught my eye in the newspaper that day. It reported on record high levels of Carbon Dioxide being found in the latest measurements. Given the upward trend that has now been on display for more than 60 years, that would normally be seen as disappointing but not surprising. But context is everything.
We are just now emerging from the economic disruption caused by COVID-19. For more than a year people have stayed home. They also bought less, drove less, flew less. As a result, business dried up. Manufacturers cut production back drastically. Shipping goods became much more difficult, especially if a border crossing was involved. The usual cast of characters responsible for Carbon Dioxide emissions all took big hits.
As a result, Carbon Dioxide emissions fell by 5.8% in 2020. That should have resulted on good news on the Global Warming front. But Carbon Dioxide hit 419 PPM in May of 2021. That's a new record. It's only 2 PPM higher than it was a year ago. But, given how much COVID decreased economic activity one would think it would have gone down significantly. The news gets worse.
The currently agreed upon target of Global Warming mitigation plans is a 7.6% reduction every year from 2020 to 2030. If achieved, this is supposed to cause the global temperature to increase by 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) or less. Swinging a COVID wrecking ball at the economy only caused emissions to decrease by 5.8%. And the decrease was so transient that Carbon Dioxide actually increased from May of 2020 to May of 2021.
This is the clearest evidence possible of just how hard it will be to stop, or even substantially slow the rate of increase of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere. Couple this with the fact that there is still little will, political or otherwise, to implement the draconian measures that would be necessary. It's just not going to happen.
That means that the "how bad is it right now" question is critically important. I noted a story from one newspaper that was published about a week ago. I ended up putting the writing of this post on hold for several days. During that period story after story after story of extreme bad weather hit the news. Bad weather events are getting almost as common as mass shooting events. Each type of event has now become so common that only the worst events even make the news now.
It has gotten to the point that only those who go out of their way to deny or avoid the increasingly obvious signs can remain Climate Deniers. Mother Nature is literally rubbing our faces in Global Warming on a daily basis now. If it's not droughts, its wild fires and dust storms. Or it is the flip side, torrential rains, floods, and the like. The weather has changed to the point where places that were hospitable to occupation are no longer livable.
Right now, only a few places have seen conditions change to that extent. But you would have been hard pressed to find any such places even as little as ten years ago. Things are still manageable. But only if things don't continue to get worse. But getting worse is already baked into the cake.
One of the things we have learned since the first IPCC report is just how critical the oceans are. When scientists first started studying the life cycle of Carbon Dioxide they quickly discovered how little they knew. They could roughly estimate how much Carbon Dioxide human activity was throwing into the air. And they had a reasonable idea of where about half of it ended up. But where the other half went was then a complete mystery.
They now know that the missing half goes into the ocean. And it turns the ocean acidic. The ocean is ginormous. But there is enough Carbon Dioxide involved that the effect is easy to measure. And the effect is bad. Lots of sea creatures depend on shells or bones or other hard substances. Acidic water damages those hard substances and makes them harder to create in the first place.
The negative impact this increased level of acidity has already been enough to be noticeable. It's bad now but not yet really bad. Something that is already much worse is heat. The surface of the earth is already noticeably warmer. And that has translated into the surface of the ocean getting noticeably warmer.
The most spectacular result of this is more strong (category 4 and category 5) hurricanes. The magic number is 22 degrees Celsius. If the water a hurricane is traveling over is 22 degrees or warmer the hurricane quickly increases in intensity. We now see hurricanes going from category 2 to category 4 in less than 24 hours. No one thought that was even possible a decade ago. Now meteorologists have seen it happen several times.
The ocean is full of currents. They cause surface water to "downwell" into deeper parts of the ocean and deep water to "upwell" to the surface. It turns out that corals are very sensitive to temperature. Downwelling warm water has heated the water that surrounds coral reefs. That has caused "bleaching" events around the world. A coral's colors come from tiny creatures that live on the surface of the coral skeleton. Warm water causes these creatures to flee leaving the white skeleton material behind.
It turns out that there is an effect that is even more perverse than coral bleaching. Ocean water circulates. It downwells here. It upwells there. Over time the temperature of the surface water gets propagated to deeper and deeper parts of the ocean. Until recently all the upwelling water was old, cold water. That tended to keep the earth's surface cooler. But not anymore.
Global arming has been going on long enough that the upwelling water is now warmer than it used to be. And that means that the oceans no longer cool the surface as much as they used to. There is a general term for what is going on here. It's called inertia.
Lots of additional warming is baked in by this inertia. It will happen even if we wave a magic wand and cause the level of Carbon Dioxide in the air to instantaneously drop all the way back to per-industrial levels and stay there.
In terms of the weather, we are living our best life right now. All those storms, all those droughts and floods, all those high temperature records. They constitute our best life. Going forward, it's going to keep getting worse no matter what we do.
No one has done the computation or modeling to estimate how much worse will it get if we fix things immediately. But there is no doubt that things will get considerably worse. And it will keep getting worse for 40-200 years. That's how long it would take for the bad things that are already built in but haven't happened yet to work themselves out.
But there is no magic wand. We are not going to immediately return Carbon Dioxide levels to per-industrial levels. There are powerful and well established groups that know how to fight most of the activities Gates outlined in his book. The political will to oppose these powerful groups is building. But they are only powerful enough to win a skirmish here and a skirmish there.
A court ordered Royal Dutch Shell to drastically reduce greenhouse emissions. Exxon-Mobil, the giant oil company, now has three "green" people on its board. But the Shell court case might get overturned or cut back drastically by an appellate court. And the Exxon-Mobil board members are far from a majority.
There are rays of hope to be found here and there. But these are candles of hope when what we need are search lights. Substantial progress is years away. And that means we need to shift our focus. Most current effort is focused on avoidance. Gates book tells us how to avoid a climate catastrophe. It tells us little about how to live with one.
It is time to shift our attention to mitigation. If it is possible, we should do both. But the Global Warming catastrophe has only been slowed by most of our efforts being devoted to avoidance. Fortunately, mother nature is weighing in more and more loudly and clearly each day.
Ten years ago it was relatively easy to avoid noticing any of the effects of Global Warming. That strategy is now on the ropes. Mother Nature is already making the case that Global Warming is real, and that it is bad. As time goes by that case will only get stronger and harder to ignore. The need for people to articulate the case will diminish. But Mother Nature lacks the ability to provide direction on the subject of mitigation.
I, however, have posted on the subject of mitigation before. I did it all the way back in 2018. Here's the link: Sigma 5: Global Warming. Mitigation is possible. That's good because we have no choice. We are going to be forced to find a way to learn to live with the effects of Global Warming. After all, Global Warming has won.
