Chapter Three Excerpt: Planetary Purgatory
Obviously, if you get drought indices like these, there’s no adaptation that’s possible.
–David Rind, NASA climate scientist, 2005
We’re showing warming and earlier springs tying in with large forest fi re frequencies. Lots of people think climate change and the ecological responses are 50 to 100 years away. But it’s not 50 to 100 years away–it’s happening now in forest ecosystems through fire.
– Thomas Swetnam, University of Arizona climate scientist, 2006
Imagine if the climate changed and extreme weather became so constant that it was no longer considered extreme. Mammoth heat waves like the one that killed 35,000 Europeans in 2003 would occur every other year. Mega- droughts and widespread wildfires, like those of the record- breaking 2005 wildfire season, which ravaged 8.5 million acres, would be the norm. This new climate would wipe out whole forests, including virtually every pine tree in British Columbia. The Arctic would have little or no summer ice, and the Greenland ice cap would melt, eventually raising sea levels by 20 feet.
If we permit this Planetary Purgatory to occur, the nation and the world would be forced to begin a desperate race against time–a race against the vicious cycles in which an initial warming causes changes to the climate system that lead to more warming, which makes adapting to climate change a never- ending, ever- changing, expensive, exhausting struggle for our children, and their children, and on and on for generations.
This chapter will focus on (1) the impacts of accelerated warming, especially drought and wildfires, and (2) the fatal feedbacks that will probably start to kick into overdrive during this era and complicate any effort to stop the Greenland Ice Sheet from melting….
January 16th, 2007 at 3:56 pm
Thomas Swetnam has found that the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) has played a major role in determining the scale and intensity of N. American wildfiles.
Do you? Is that discussed in Chapter 3?
Between 1650 and 1750 wildfires extended from Canada to Mexico. I guess N. America was a “Purgatory” a couple of centuries ago. Do you blame those “raging” wildfires on global warming and anthropogenic emissions?
January 17th, 2007 at 1:46 pm
> Mammoth heat waves like the one that
> killed 35,000 Europeans in 2003 would
> occur every other year.
It has been fairly well documented that the reason for most of these deaths was (1) France’s reluctance to use air-conditioning, and (2) the practice of all Frenchmen going on vacation in the month of August instead of tending to their elderly.
Notice that heat waves in the US do not cause such events.
January 17th, 2007 at 6:07 pm
Thomas Swetnam is certainly a knowledgeable source on wildfires, which is why Chapter 3 opens with an excerpt from him - a quotation in which he singles out the consequences of climate change as one of the factors contributing to wildfires in 2006. He and his research were evidently not neglected sources, even in what little is posted here.
And the point raised on the European heat wave signals to me that we need work on global warming preparedness. The examples raised were also about a failure to respond appropriately, so let’s start by addressing what we can of the problem (what likely intensified the heat wave) and then ask ourselves how we can plan for the outcomes that are unavoidable.