WHAT'S HOT: Climate Crisis: Code Red for Humanity

Since the age of six or so, I have been an avid weather watcher, fascinated by clouds and storms, rain and snow, and how weather systems come and go. Moving with my siblings and parents halfway around the world (Dad was a senior officer in the U.S. Coast Guard; you might be surprised just how many places the Coast Guard has bases). The onset of the monsoon in the Philippines, with its dark, fat-bellied clouds, was a sight to behold, and not unlike a Puerto Rican tropical storm. The suburbs of Washington, D.C., could receive heavy snow and ice storms. I also love shovelling snow and chipping ice. I loved watching a snowstorm move in from the southwest. Dad also negotiated with the bureaucracy and got me on the subscription list for the U.S. Weather Bureau’s daily weather map, which folded out to about three feet by two, the map that the real weather forecasters used.

I wanted to be a weatherman until I discovered that most of their time was spent indoors, in offices, with machines. Watching the sky had gone out of fashion among the professionals.

My family continued to move. The advent of frequent rains in the Pacific Northwest got boring during my 17 years there, although we did have an occasional heavy, sloppy snowstorm, providing some entertainment. Watching the snowline slide down mountainsides also gave me hours of pleasure.

Following Ph.D. work at the University of Washington, the time came to pick my professorial working location. A major qualification for adult life in Omaha, as I saw it, was real weather: thunderstorms, the occasional tornado (as long as it wasn’t too close), deluges, droughts, snow and ice—all with a few really nice, blue-skied late-spring and early fall days when we could watch spring foliage burst out or leaves turn color.

Over time, Native American history and global warming have become my primary academic interests for the last 70 years. I have seen many very specific scientific studies come and go. Many of these reports are valuable because of the specific ways in which they state the relationships between humankind, greenhouse gases, global warming, and the damage that this rough climate regime can cause, but also the ways in which this information can be used to support legal arguments which may, in years to come, be used to formulate deliberations which can be used to define environmental law and penalties for violations of it. By defining real legal doctrines with precedents and penalties, environmental law may escape the funny-money status that it has held wherein land, sea, and atmosphere have been defined as free goods that may be freely exploited without meaningful penalties, except those specified by legal property rights held by human beings, corporations, or nation-states. When the Earth and its component parts have legal status—that is, rights, ipso facto, in and of themselves—we are on our way to having real environmental law.

A student of meteorology and cliThe

next step (much more important than signing a document) is reforming the world’s energy infrastructure to favor Earth-favorable energy sources, and imposing economic penalties for continued use of fossil fuels.

APRIL / MAY / JUNE 2025 NE REPORT, P. 9

mate can tell that what we see and measure is part of a single pattern (as are some other unusual events, such as a heavy rainfall at the peak of Greenland’s ice cap).

“Climate Change is alternating and weakening the jet stream, narrow bands of wind that circle the Earth, flowing west to east. Those changes allow key weather-producing systems of high and low pressure to stall in place.” Thus, for the last four decades (about 1980 to today), high pressure has dominated the Western United States, often producing drought and heat; low pressure has dominated the East, producing rain, snow, and below-average temperatures. These patterns dominate, but every so often they will flip, briefly, but not long enough to change the overall pattern.

Other parts of the Earth also have patterns that stall in place, producing similar results. The U.S. Pacific Northwest, Western Canada, the Arctic, the Antarctic Peninsula, and Siberia are among the fastest-warming places on Earth. In the late spring and early summer of 2021, Siberia experienced a truly astounding heat wave at about the same time that the Pacific Northwest reached its highest temperatures on record. Global warming is not an equal-opportunity disaster.

Because of “thermal inertia,” continued heating and other extremes are rather easy to anticipate. They are happening more rapidly now than most scientists anticipated even 30 years ago. The media now reads like an incident report of the many ways that malign changes in climate have affected the lives of many millions of people around the world.

What we see lays the groundwork for a future that has already begun to evolve. It shows us that if emissions of greenhouse gases are not sharply reduced in a short time, warming and damage from it will continue and accelerate over the years to come. These arguments have been stated since at least 1980 by individuals or groups of scientists, but only in recent times have documents bearing the imprints of about 195 states, for all intents and purposes, the entire population of the Earth. The United States was a gigantic, ignorant exception under the presidency of Donald J. Trump. He still thinks it’s all a hoax, no matter how much evidence piles up. The same Trump also believes that the latest hot topic in South African history is a conspiracy of Black people to knock off white folks. He cracked that one open before South Africa’s president, while I wrote this piece. Just because he is rich beyond imagination and hangs out with Elon Musk doesn’t make him intelligent or wise.

The next step (much more important than signing a document) is reforming the world’s energy infrastructure to favor Earth-favorable energy sources, and imposing economic penalties for continued use of fossil fuels.

mate can tell that what we see and measure is part of a single pattern (as are some other unusual events, such as a heavy rainfall at the peak of Greenland’s ice cap).

“Climate Change is alternating and weakening the jet stream, narrow bands of wind that circle the Earth, flowing west to east. Those changes allow key weather-producing systems of high and low pressure to stall in place.” Thus, for the last four decades (about 1980 to today), high pressure has dominated the Western United States, often producing drought and heat; low pressure has dominated the East, producing rain, snow, and below-average temperatures. These patterns dominate, but every so often they will flip, briefly, but not long enough to change the overall pattern.

Other parts of the Earth also have patterns that stall in place, producing similar results. The U.S. Pacific Northwest, Western Canada, the Arctic, the Antarctic Peninsula, and Siberia are among the fastest-warming places on Earth. In the late spring and early summer of 2021, Siberia experienced a truly astounding heat wave at about the same time that the Pacific Northwest reached its highest temperatures on record. Global warming is not an equal-opportunity disaster.

Because of “thermal inertia,” continued heating and other extremes are rather easy to anticipate. They are happening more rapidly now than most scientists anticipated even 30 years ago. The media now reads like an incident report of the many ways that malign changes in climate have affected the lives of many millions of people around the world.

What we see lays the groundwork for a future that has already begun to evolve. It shows us that if emissions of greenhouse gases are not sharply reduced in a short time, warming and damage from it will continue and accelerate over the years to come. These arguments have been stated since at least 1980 by individuals or groups of scientists, but only in recent times have documents bearing the imprints of about 195 states, for all intents and purposes, the entire population of the Earth. The United States was a gigantic, ignorant exception under the presidency of Donald J. Trump. He still thinks it’s all a hoax, no matter how much evidence piles up. The same Trump also believes that the latest hot topic in South African history is a conspiracy of Black people to knock off white folks. He cracked that one open before South Africa’s president, while I wrote this piece. Just because he is rich beyond imagination and hangs out with Elon Musk doesn’t make him intelligent or wise.

The next step (much more important than signing a document) is reforming the world’s energy infrastructure to favor Earth-favorable energy sources, and imposing economic penalties for continued use of fossil fuels. The development of legal doctrines that favor environmentally useful (and necessary!) changes in world legal structures to enforce progress toward a sustainable Earth will become essential before the end of the present century.

The use of fossil fuels must be defined as pollution and, as such, must become a crime. Assertion of such as a form of freedom of expression will become as illegal as the murder of one person by another, or racing an illegal oil-powered automobile down an interstate highway at 200 miles an hour.

Murder and excessive speeding both carry penalties for good reasons. Outlawing the use of fossil fuels also has a good reason because the destruction of a sustaining Earth should no longer be allowed out of ignorance vis-à-vis what science tells us. Taken as a whole, the outlawing of fossil fuels must begin soon, and emphatically. This bus is reaching its final stop. No joke. No fantasy doctrines from the likes of Trump and his cohort. The change must be worldwide, but wealthy nations must take the lead to allow the development of greater equity. As non-fossil energy sources become the major type of energy, differences will eventually even out.

The Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, has called the present situation a “code red” for humanity. Essentially all of the Earth’s increase in temperatures after the mid-19th century (that’s since widespread use of coal and oil began) has been driven by humanity’s increase in the use of fossil fuels. After less than 200 years, fossil fuels have put our Earth on death watch, by which I mean that their continued use will condemn Earth and its inhabitants to a lethal, miserable future that will continue to become more lethal and miserable in an exponential fashion as long as dependence on fossil fuels continues.

Some may condemn these words as radical and dangerous to the status quo. Yes, they are, but they are also necessary, worth saying loudly and acting upon quickly. No funny business. No “clean coal.” That road leads to a world that no sane person would want to leave to his or her children.

Bruce E. Johansen has written and published several books on this climate change during the past 25 years, the most recent of which is Nationalism vs. Nature: Warming and War, from Springer publishers in Frankfurt, Germany.