Ho Hum, Global Boiling

AMALFI, Italy — “Climate change,” finally a hot topic after decades of ignored warnings, is easier to grasp if you humanize it. Take Belle, a lovable toddler who lives in Boston.

Belle, not yet a year old, didn’t say much when I interviewed her poolside on the Amalfi coast. But her dad advises banks on climate risks; her mom is a skilled communicator. Their generation can shape a livable world for her own kids. Or not.

Unless many more correspondents across the world call bullshit on inept leaders and keep a hard focus on governments that fail to act, Belle’s prospects for the future amount to a popsicle’s chance on a car hood in Phoenix.

Eight billion of us share a leaky ark in rough waters, and food stocks are dwindling fast. Wildfires are so bad that their smoke chokes distant urban centers. U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres made headlines with a new phrase: global boiling.

The Arctic is heating at four times the world average, and Antarctica is melting fast. When ice cover goes, methane will poison the atmosphere at a far greater rate than carbon dioxide. Marine life is dying. There is no fix, only prevention of worse to come.

A panel of the world’s most authoritative scientists has banged ever-louder alarms since the 1980s. Bill McKibben, among others, has written his heart out in books and articles with irrefutable detail. In a recent piece, he lamented: “The least satisfying words in the English language are ‘I told you so.’”

This is a mass-messaging challenge. Too many news organizations have cut back foreign bureaus. Reporters parachute into “breaking” news from headquarters, then return home before moving on to a different story.

Television mostly focuses on disjointed snapshots of victims suffering the effects. BBC, an exception, tells its viewers: “Temperatures are not only record-breaking but also life-threatening.” Its seasoned correspondents examine cause as well as effect.

In America, technological advances that could rescue Earth are instead making the problem worse. Coverage at a distance, soon to be enhanced by AI, can crunch data, show images and quote experts. But it can’t report where it matters: at the human level.

If enough people do not force their leaders to protect what remains of a collapsing global ecosystem – together and effectively — we are all toast. How soon? Does that really matter? The waters off Florida are already hotter than backyard jacuzzis.

Of all Donald Trump depredations, nothing surpasses his ignorant self-serving denial of a dead-obvious threat to human survival. If that sounds too harsh, think it through. Pain is just starting; the worst-case scenario is beyond imagination.

Barack Obama pushed hard for the 2015 Paris Agreement at the U.N. climate summit. Though short of scientists’ recommendations, it was finally progress after 21 meetings in a process called COP, Conference of the Parties. After 2017, copout was closer to it.

Trump rejected the accords with scathing condemnation. That gave major polluters free rein to expel more hot air into the atmosphere with speeches promising half-measures that few keep. Just for starters, China and India are doubling down on coal.

The European Union, along with some other countries, is making significant progress. But the crisis transcends all borders. America has the wherewithal and clout to lead urgent global action. Yet the rest of world watches it in disbelief, if not contempt.

A clown-car Congress undercuts Joe Biden’s massive climate-action plans. House Republicans squander time and resources to gut-shoot him. A twice-impeached ex-president facing multiple criminal indictments sucks up all the air. Meantime, Earth alternately burns and floods far faster than most scientists predicted.

As 2024 elections approach, Trump-think dominates a Republican party that sees a collapsing climate as what Al Gore called it: an inconvenient truth. Candidates, funded heavily by fossil fuel and vested interests, insist that everything is normal.

Their short-sighted greed, faux-Christian dogma and power obsession defy belief. Trump has already packed the courts. If they control the White House, Congress and crucial states, they condemn not only Belle’s world but also their own kids’ and everyone else’s.

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Belle is the fourth generation of my extended family, which gathered for my 80th birthday near Amalfi. Vesuvius brooded in the distance above Pompeii, where scientists are still digging up ancient lessons, long forgotten.

The Romans thought about climate and conservation. Leonardo Da Vinci later sketched the patterns of winds and waters. Modern scientists drew on old wisdom from Moors in Spain to pre-Columbian tribes in Arizona. They saw it coming.

But the problem is society, not science. Besides overheating, the world is spinning out of control. With so much to grasp, and so much contradictory information, most people focus on their own expertise and mostly guess about what is beyond their line of sight.

Our Amalfi gang included a young alternative-energy expert with innovative ideas. My sister Jane, a pioneer environmental reporter, has watched climate collapse since puzzled polar bears found themselves stranded on ice floes. But a “green new deal” or anything else needs concerted global action with relief to help poor countries adjust.

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I haven’t yet reported from hell, but I grew up in Arizona and live there for part of the year. Temperatures approaching 120-degrees (49 Celsius) for weeks on end, “cooling” to the upper 90s at night, are beyond anything words or pictures can convey.

In Pima County around Tucson, heat has killed 26 people just through July, two less than in all of 2022. That should rise sharply as data comes in, and August is expected to be a scorcher. The count excludes border crossers in the desert.

Heat is just part of the picture. Air-conditioning, for those who have it, requires power. In Arizona, half comes from coal and natural gas. Dwindling water supplies evaporate in the sun, fill swimming pools (and in Phoenix, surf parks) and put out forest fires.

Thirsty crops need yet more irrigation. Planes are grounded, productivity slows.

After prolonged baking drought, freak monsoons wash away fragile topsoil. Mountain wildfires cause mud rivers, which cut deep gullies that destroy homes below.

My blood boils even in winter when legislators elected to safeguard citizens spout insulting horseshit. One Republican state legislator tweeted that heat is normal in Arizona. Those who don’t like it are free to leave. She sells real estate to people in gated communities who pop in for the season when it gets cold back east.

Kari Lake, who came close to being governor and now clings to Trump with an eye on the vice presidency, echoes that theme: We Arizonans know what’s best. She came from California to a state where human settlements have lived in balance with nature for 10,000 years.

A recent climate assessment from Britain forecasts that by 2060 today’s high temperatures will be the average. Imagine life year-by-year until then. Last summer, more than 61,000 people died from the heat in Europe. And 2023 is hotter.

Like a pointillist painting, details add up to a terrifying tableau. Since March, average world sea-surface temperatures beat every daily record. Some Florida coral bed die-offs reached 100 percent. Warm oceans impact land, a factor in countless wildfires. In Greece, flames consumed 50,000 olive trees in Rhodes’s noble old groves.

Republicans insist climate action is too expense and eliminates jobs. In fact, non-partisan studies show beyond doubt that phasing out fossil-fuel subsidies to develop renewable energy would give the U.S. economy a major boast. Oil and coal interests, aware of that, have spent billions to fund politicians who protect the status quo.

Short-term and jobs are hardly the issue. Without urgent, sustained global action, ecological calamities will cost increasing multiple trillions until Homo sapiens eventually cede their only home to crocodiles and cockroaches.

There is much more to say, but there is no need to say it. “Climate change” is long past. This is, as Guterres says, global boiling. Evidence is unmissable in every nook or cranny of the planet, from the ocean floor to inner space.

Damned little time remains to act. States and private industry can make a dent, but this takes a wealthy nation committed to human decency to broker compromise. America created much of this problem. It can take the lead in confronting it.

Biden is up to the job and needs to stay in the Oval Office to do it, with an enlightened majority in Congress. That depends on whether enough voters find authoritative news sources that lay out the stakes — and then reflect on the Belles in their own family.

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https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/i-told-you-so

https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2023/07/28/ocean-temperature-maps-heat-records/?utm_campaign=wp_evening_edition&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_evening