The Summer the Earth Sizzled
by Professor Bruce E. Johansen
Remember last Summer? As a reminder, we have a small gallery of satellite pictures, courtesy of NASA. Red means hotter than average; blue signifies colder. Lots of red on these two maps, you say? Remember the birthing years of global warming when people talked about “tipping points” in the future tense? That was before last July and August, the hottest two months in recorded history, hot enough that temperatures busted through the point at which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicted that we would be on our way to climate apocalypse.
So, here we are, past the point of having tipped, even if a notable number of Republicans still think climate change is a myth believed only by anti-American, hippie, tree-hugging misfits. Here we are, even if the Trumpoids et al. still think it’s only imagination. Just how hot does it have to get before they become believers in the rules of nature?
Last summer was quite a set piece for sweating over what may come next. A month or more of 110 F. or above F. in Phoenix. One hundred F. in the surf off the southern Florida Keys? Last summer felt like the tipping point of our lives so far, at any rate, how long will it be before we repeat or beat it?
Remember the fires? – Quebec, Ontario, California, Yellowknife, California Greece, Spain, Chile, Siberia, and more. Once upon a time in Omaha, a summer northwesterly wind usually (but not always) brought a crisp blue sky. Lately has been the first time we had seen the National Weather Service dropping “smoke” into our forecasts day after day. The past several midsummers, the sky often has been the color of week-old mashed potatoes, smelling like acid and reminding us that along with old cars and rusty factories, burning forests also adds carbon dioxide, the prince of greenhouse gases, to our atmosphere, accelerating our descent into climate-change hell.
Almost any time I have turned on the TV news or read a newspaper this summer, climate change has played a leading role—more heat, with records set world-wide, and observations that we are living through the hottest period since the beginning of humankind’s tenancy on Earth; with heavier and more damaging rainfall, wind and hail, as well as temperatures.
How Greenhouse Gases Operate
These events are no accident. They are a result of how greenhouse gases operate.
The speed with which temperatures increase in both the oceans and atmosphere (along with the intensity of precipitation) are governed by thermal inertia, the delayed effect of greenhouse-gas emissions and their effects in the air and water. Temperatures’ actual effects in the air are evident about 50 years after these gases are emitted. In the oceans, inertia requires about 100 years.
When the fossil-fuel age began two hundred years ago, the proportion of CO2 varied from about 180 parts per million to about 280. Since then, it has increased to about 420 ppm. That is as high as the proportion of CO2 has been since the Pliocene, 2 to 4 million years ago. Many scientists believe that a level of 350 ppm reflects the level at which human beings, plants, and animals can survive comfortably most of the time. The level of CO2 has not declined except for a few very short periods since the first coal was burned about 200 years ago, at the beginning of the machine age.
What Will It Take?
Until that curve at 420 ppm begins to decline, and continues to fall, heat in the atmosphere and oceans will continue to rise.
Until we deal with humankind’s inability to make peace between nations, and the same nations’ unwillingness to peacefully set strict, enforceable limits on greenhouse gas emissions, the spiral of increasing gases in the atmosphere will continue. If it continues, the lives of every living thing on our only home will be in increasing peril. Reducing that peril should be our number-one priority. The other path will be increasingly dangerous and unpleasant. This is not a matter of political debate. It’s how the natural world works.
Bruce E. Johansen’s latest book is Nature & Nationalism: Weather & War, released in September, 2023. By springer-Nature in Frankfurt, Germany.
Bruce E. Johansen
University of Nebraska at Omaha, Emeritus
Communication & Native American Studies, Environmental Studies
Omaha, Nebraska
[email protected]
Remember last Summer? As a reminder, we have a small gallery of satellite pictures, courtesy of NASA. Red means hotter than average; blue signifies colder. Lots of red on these two maps, you say? Remember the birthing years of global warming when people talked about “tipping points” in the future tense? That was before last July and August, the hottest two months in recorded history, hot enough that temperatures busted through the point at which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicted that we would be on our way to climate apocalypse.
So, here we are, past the point of having tipped, even if a notable number of Republicans still think climate change is a myth believed only by anti-American, hippie, tree-hugging misfits. Here we are, even if the Trumpoids et al. still think it’s only imagination. Just how hot does it have to get before they become believers in the rules of nature?
Last summer was quite a set piece for sweating over what may come next. A month or more of 110 F. or above F. in Phoenix. One hundred F. in the surf off the southern Florida Keys? Last summer felt like the tipping point of our lives so far, at any rate, how long will it be before we repeat or beat it?
Remember the fires? – Quebec, Ontario, California, Yellowknife, California Greece, Spain, Chile, Siberia, and more. Once upon a time in Omaha, a summer northwesterly wind usually (but not always) brought a crisp blue sky. Lately has been the first time we had seen the National Weather Service dropping “smoke” into our forecasts day after day. The past several midsummers, the sky often has been the color of week-old mashed potatoes, smelling like acid and reminding us that along with old cars and rusty factories, burning forests also adds carbon dioxide, the prince of greenhouse gases, to our atmosphere, accelerating our descent into climate-change hell.
Almost any time I have turned on the TV news or read a newspaper this summer, climate change has played a leading role—more heat, with records set world-wide, and observations that we are living through the hottest period since the beginning of humankind’s tenancy on Earth; with heavier and more damaging rainfall, wind and hail, as well as temperatures.
How Greenhouse Gases Operate
These events are no accident. They are a result of how greenhouse gases operate.
The speed with which temperatures increase in both the oceans and atmosphere (along with the intensity of precipitation) are governed by thermal inertia, the delayed effect of greenhouse-gas emissions and their effects in the air and water. Temperatures’ actual effects in the air are evident about 50 years after these gases are emitted. In the oceans, inertia requires about 100 years.
When the fossil-fuel age began two hundred years ago, the proportion of CO2 varied from about 180 parts per million to about 280. Since then, it has increased to about 420 ppm. That is as high as the proportion of CO2 has been since the Pliocene, 2 to 4 million years ago. Many scientists believe that a level of 350 ppm reflects the level at which human beings, plants, and animals can survive comfortably most of the time. The level of CO2 has not declined except for a few very short periods since the first coal was burned about 200 years ago, at the beginning of the machine age.
What Will It Take?
Until that curve at 420 ppm begins to decline, and continues to fall, heat in the atmosphere and oceans will continue to rise.
Until we deal with humankind’s inability to make peace between nations, and the same nations’ unwillingness to peacefully set strict, enforceable limits on greenhouse gas emissions, the spiral of increasing gases in the atmosphere will continue. If it continues, the lives of every living thing on our only home will be in increasing peril. Reducing that peril should be our number-one priority. The other path will be increasingly dangerous and unpleasant. This is not a matter of political debate. It’s how the natural world works.
Bruce E. Johansen’s latest book is Nature & Nationalism: Weather & War, released in September, 2023. By springer-Nature in Frankfurt, Germany.
Bruce E. Johansen
University of Nebraska at Omaha, Emeritus
Communication & Native American Studies, Environmental Studies
Omaha, Nebraska
[email protected]
