Connecting Extreme Weather Dots Across the Map

From: earthactionnetwork@earthlink.net  

: http://www.alternet.org/story/151671/

 

Connecting Extreme Weather Dots Across the Map

 

By Janet Redman,

Other Words: July 18, 2011

 

I took a cross-country road trip in late June that became a race to outrun the triple-digit heat waves that have literally buckled highways between the Midwest and the East Coast.

 

The record-breaking scorcher was an apt send-off. As I weaved my way across the United States, I found the consequences of extreme weather everywhere I looked.

 

After the heat, the first sign of something unusual came in Iowa. There, every creek I crossed seemed to overflow its banks. Water pooled in cornfields.

 

By the time I reached Nebraska, radio advisories warning about bridges closed due to swollen waterways seemed routine.

 

Late one night, I pulled under an overpass between Sydney and Potter, Nebraska to find refuge from hail big enough that it cracked my windshield. There, I met an off-duty police officer who said he's spending more and more time cleaning up after an increasing number of tornados and micro-bursts like the one we were trapped in.

 

Meanwhile, the drought-wracked southwest was blazing. New Mexico was experiencing the largest wildfire in state history, and an all-out battle was being waged by firefighters to steer the flames away from Los Alamos National Laboratory, where radioactive material for making nuclear weapons is housed. Now the concern is contaminated soil being washed into the Rio Grande by flash floods in deforested canyons. Fires in New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, Florida, Georgia, and Colorado are adding up to a record-setting wildfire season.

 

This year's waves of floods and fires followed the unprecedented series of tornados that hammered towns in Missouri, Alabama, Kansas, Arkansas, Minnesota, and Massachusetts.

 

Talking about the weather isn't small talk any more. Something is amiss.

 

But for some reason we're loathe to take the next step and connect the dots of extreme floods, heat waves, droughts, and storms popping up across the map to reveal the bigger picture: climate change.

 

For years, scientists have told us that as the planet warms up, we can expect changes in whole patterns of weather and in trends like how much moisture the atmosphere will hold. Some places will get dryer, others wetter, and others hotter. In its 2010 State of the Climate report, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration traced some 41 indicators showing that broad shifts and individual extreme events that have occurred over the past year are indeed consistent with scientists' predictions of a warmer world.

 

Notably, for the first time two studies published in the journal Nature have demonstrated a cause-and-effect relationship between climate change and increased rain and snow events, and thus with increased flood risk.

 

The question before us now is not whether the natural disasters making headlines across the United States are somehow connected, but why we are so reluctant to connect them.

 

My theory is that it's just too scary. If we admit that these extreme weather events have something to do with a global system, it feels too complicated to do anything about or prepare ourselves for. If we accept that climate change is something caused by the way we consume and produce everything from food to fuel, then we also have to admit that we need to fundamentally change the way our economy works.

 

But no matter how daunting the challenge of climate change, we have to get our heads out of the sand. If we don't, the rising waters will drown us.

 

We need to demand investment in ideas and infrastructure that will reduce our emissions and create good jobs like rapid public transit, renewable energy systems, energy efficient buildings, and local food production.

 

We have to rein in the power of corporate interests like coal, oil, gas, and big agriculture that take government handouts with one hand and push us deeper into ecological chaos with the other. And we have to strengthen the social safety net that will catch and care for families when the inevitable natural disasters hit vulnerable communities.

 

 

Janet Redman is co-director of the Sustainable Energy & Economy Network at the Institute for Policy Studies.

 

© 2011 Other Words All rights reserved.

 

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http://www.alternet.org/story/151741/heat%2C_drought%2C_famine_all_part_of_coming_%27exponential%27_increase_of_climate- related_disasters

 

 

Heat, Drought, Famine All Part of Coming 'Exponential' Increase Of Climate-Related Disasters

 

By Matthew McDermott,

TreeHugger: July 22, 2011

 

With half of the United States under heat advisories, 22 people dead (and counting) from the extreme weather, the Horn of Africa experiencing the strongest drought in over half a century and famine conditions across parts of Somalia, how many more times can we comfortably repeat the mantra "though no single weather event can be linked directly to climate change, these sort of events are consistent with what climate models predict will happen" before more and more people die and we begin taking climate change seriously?

 

 

The UN Security Council just issued a timidly worded statement (dilluted by objections from Russia and China, who were worried that climate change doesn't properly fall under the Security Council mandate) that climate change has "possible security implications".

 

But UNEP executive director Achim Steiner stated the situation more bluntly--and was more in line with what the military in the United States has said and the militaries of several European nations have also said on the threat from climate change, it's worth noting.

 

Steiner said that climate change will "exponentially" increase the scale of natural disasters, the BBC reported.

 

The current situation in Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia is already "proving a challenge" to our collective abilities to handle such events, "particularly if they occur simultaneously and start affecting, for instance, global food markets, regional food security issues, displacing people, creating refugees across borders."

 

Already 11.3 million people in the region have been affected by the drought and conditions continue to worsen. 3.7 million people are facing starvation. 500 million of those people are children at risk of death from malnutrition and simply lack of food resulting from the worst famine in the past two decades.

 

Failure to Act On Climate A 'Dereliction of Duty': US Official

 

Perhaps surprisingly and certainly ironically, considering the supremely weak US position in international climate negotiations and the head-in-the-sand domestic stance on climate policy, US Ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice was particularly forthright in stating the situation regarding climate change:

 

We have dozens of countries in this body and this very room whose very existence is threatened. They have asked this Council to demostrate our understanding that their security is profoundly threatened. Instead, because of the refusal of a few to accept our responsibility, this Council is saying by its silence, in effect, tough luck. This is more than disappointing, it's pathetic, it's short-sighted, and frankly it is a dereliction of duty.

Leave aside for the moment the dereliction of duty on the part of the US in terms of taking meaningful action on climate and energy policy (held up no doubt by Tea Party and big polluter obstructionism but let's not forget that the Obama administration climate proposals over the past two years have been pathetically short of satisfying scientific recommendations).

 

Aid To Africa Falls Well Short

 

In the immediate, as Democracy Now! has been pointing out for several days now, the repsonse to what the UN has described as the greatest humanitarian disaster of 2011 so far has fallen well short of what is required.

 

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has said $1.6 billion is needed for Somalia, with $300 million needed in the next two months to alleviate the famine conditions. To deal with ongoing humanitarian crises in Africa the UN says $3.6 billion has been given so far, but that an additional $4.3 billion is required.

 

Oxfam has said that the richest nations of the world have practiced "willful neglect" in ignoring warnings over the past few months as to the fragile food security situation.

 

US-Islamist Proxy Wars Don't Help At All

 

Tangling up the situation further: Until just a few weeks ago the Islamist militants controlling some of the areas of Somalia worst affected by drought and famine had prohibited international aid from entering the region. And even if they had let it in, US policy of aiding groups it classifies as terrorist prohibited aid going there anyway on the grounds that it would be materially supporting those groups. All at the same time the CIA wages a covert and not-so-covert war against them. Oh, and then there's the effect on that whole kerfuffle of organized crime dumping toxic waste off the coast of Somalia, one of the factors driving poor fishermen to piracy.

 

The point: Whether the UN Security Council admits it or not climate- related disasters, and environmental issues more broadly, are already major security concerns in Africa--and will only increase to be so across the wider world.

 

If We Wait To Act Until These Summer Heatwaves Are Commonplace, It'll Be Too Late For All Of Us

 

The collective global response, taking the lead of nations on the Security Council no doubt, has been obviously been inadequate, even as donor nations themselves are not in the middle of their own climate-induced crises (the current US heatwave notwithstanding). I cannot realistically imagine that changing much in the future, despite the genuine and earnest pleas from aid organizations.

 

At the risk of understatement, there seems little will to plan for the future or take into account the fate of the worst affected, environmentally speaking.

 

If we continue to wait until Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota and Kentucky have more summers of humidity-adjusted temperatures topping 120°F and even 130°F--accompanied for a while in the winter by increasing snows, until average temperatures are too warm for regular snows--it will simply be too late.

 

These conditions will not be exceptional events at all, as will the sort of drought-conditions turning into famine across Africa.

 

 

Matthew McDermott writes about alternative energy for TreeHugger.

 

© 2011 TreeHugger All rights reserved.

View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/151741/

 

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"We are dealing with a far more ominous threat than sickness and death.  We are dealing with the dark side of humanity -- selfishness, avarice, aggression.  All this has already polluted our skies, emptied our oceans, destroyed our forests and extinguished thousands of beautiful animals.  Are our children next? …  It is no longer enough to vaccinate them or give them food and water and only cure the symptoms of man’s tendency to destroy everything we hold dear.   Whether it be famine in Ethiopia, excruciating poverty in Guatemala and Honduras, civil strife in El Salvador or ethnic massacre in the Sudan, I saw but one glaring truth; these are not natural disaster but man-made tragedies for which there is only one man-made solution – Peace.” 

 

~Audrey Hepburn, April 1989, in a speech given while serving as goodwill ambassador for Unicef