A little while back, we wrote in this space that it seemed likely that climate change would accelerate even beyond scientists’ worst-case scenarios. It was clear — even to non-scientists such as ourselves — that the negative effects on our environment caused by climate change were creating a positive feedback loop: global warming causes damage, which in turn causes more warming.
For example, as the tundra in the Arctic regions thaws, it releases methane and carbon (which had been trapped in the frozen earth for thousands of years) into the atmosphere, which then makes the planet even warmer, and thus leads to even faster thawing of the tundra.
Similarly, as the world’s glaciers begin to melt at the poles, this process leads to even more warming of the oceans (because the exposed darker oceans absorb more solar heat), which in turn leads to even more ice-melt.
In short, it was only common sense, we wrote at the time, that these positive feedback loops inevitably would speed up the process of climate change.
Well, last week, amidst the news of a record-warm winter in Colorado, the record-shattering heat wave in California, and the record floods in Hawaii, it was reported that scientists seem to have reached a consensus that climate change is indeed accelerating faster than expected.
Some scientists had predicted that climate change would result in this sort of crazy weather. We remember a column written by the great New York Times writer Thomas Friedman almost 20 years ago in which he interviewed a climate scientist who said that “global warming” (which was the catchall phrase back then) was a bit of a misnomer.
Rather, Friedman’s expert put another term on it — “global weirding” — to describe how the effects of climate change would pop up in ways that would prove to be completely beyond what humankind ever had experienced.
Friedman wrote: “I prefer the term ‘global weirding,’ coined by Hunter Lovins, co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, because the rise in average global temperature is going to lead to all sorts of crazy things — from hotter heat spells and droughts in some places, to colder cold spells and more violent storms, more intense flooding, forest fires and species loss in other places.”
According to last week’s Times, this prediction is exactly what has come to pass, according to another expert:
“Things are getting really outside of what humans have ever seen,” said Friederike Otto, a professor of climate science at Imperial College London. “Almost every part of the world is experiencing these extreme events.”
This is all bad enough, but there is no indication that the world’s carbon emissions, which are responsible for climate change, are declining. Although carbon emissions in the United States have been flat for the past 25 years, emissions worldwide have doubled and continue to grow each and every year, driven by rapid industrialization elsewhere. The U.S. could become carbon-neutral tomorrow and it would only make a small dent — about 16 percent — in reducing global emissions.
In short, the most recent climate news brings to mind the title of a 1987 song by R.E.M. The song has nothing to do with climate change, but seems appropriate for what is coming: “It’s the end of the world as we know it.”