Hottest summer

This is just the opening salvo. As the American west is gripped by potentially the worst drought since algebra was invented 1,200 years ago and temperature records are once again shattered on a weekly basis, we are entering into unknown territory. Lytton in Canada reached a staggering 49.6 degrees Celsius on Tuesday which is hotter than Las Vegas has ever recorded. Portland topped 46.7 degrees Celsius and this is higher than anything experienced in Houston, Texas. This has been building for a long time, but things are about to get much much worse.

Globally, the planet experienced its second hottest year ever recorded in 2019, just 0.4 degrees Celsius cooler than 2016. If 2019 was feeling a little inferior, 2020 arrived on the scene, full of confidence, to claim the prize of warmest year ever recorded on Earth.

The average temperature was 1.2 degrees Celsius above the 1859-1900 level. This was also a year in which our civilization was brought to its knees because of the ongoing pandemic. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) says that the warmest six years on record have all occurred since 2015.

With the carbon already in the atmosphere, the extreme heat we are witnessing now will become the new normal. The impacts of a warming planet will be felt by us all.

In fact, they already are. Storms, droughts and heatwaves have increased by a third in just the past ten years. Scientists analyzing models in Switzerland and the UK declared that heat events like that of 2018 were unprecedented prior to 2010 and don‘t occur in historical simulations.

As fossil fuels continue to be pumped into the atmosphere, forests are felled and oceanic ecosystems destroyed, the extreme heat we have seen the past five years is only going to get worse in the next decade. Anthony Arguez at NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information in Asheville, North Carolina warns that:

“After the last five years, we’ve really separated ourselves from the past,” and he adds, “It looks pretty likely that we’re going to have a whole lot of top 10 years.”

In total, natural-disaster loss events have more than tripled in the past forty years. It is debatable whether we can continue to call these events ‘natural’ when they are being fueled by human activity.

The world is moving into uncharted territory, and our planet has only warmed by 1.2 degrees Celsius so far. The most likely scenario sees the temperature rising by at least 3 degrees Celsius by 2100, and possibly much more, and possibly sooner. What will the future look like if we continue on our current path?

The current trajectory we are on would see temperatures rise by between 3.1 degrees Celsius and 3.5 degrees Celsius by 2100. Try to imagine the storms, wildfires, droughts and floods that will become normal if we allow this to happen.

Excerpted: ‘This Is Only the Beginning: It’s About to Get Much Harder’

Commondreams.org