Plan Z: preparing for the mega-catastrophe

This week our nation's most influential newspaper ran a thoughtful, tough-minded op-ed on what to do about climate change that broke a lot of new ground…and seems to been overlooked.

I haven't linked previously, because I'm still mulling its ideas. But the time has come to recommend it to my readers. It's called Disaster at the Top of the World, because it begins with a lengthy look at the melting of the Arctic, but it really should be named after the solution it proposes: Plan Z.

It presumes that we as a society will not act to prevent climate change, which by now is becoming  inescapable. And it argues that those societies which nonetheless are prepared to respond to disaster, will be better able to survive the "climate shock" we will see more of in the 21st century:

Policy makers need to accept that societies won’t make drastic changes
to address climate change until such a crisis hits. But that doesn’t
mean there’s nothing for them to do in the meantime. When a crisis does
occur, the societies with response plans on the shelf will be far better
off than those that are blindsided. The task for national and regional
leaders, then, is to develop a set of contingency plans for possible
climate shocks — what we might call, collectively, Plan Z.

How do we prepare for what we have not faced before? Not a philosophical question any longer. 

Against flying: Joel Achenbach

Another edition in my wildly popular series.

Not really! It's just that Wa-Po columnist Joel Achenbach is so funny, when he rants against a rantable subject, he must be linked. Here goes:

Air Schlep

To save the company a couple hundred bucks I eschewed the slightly
expensive Southwest flight to Houston and instead bought a ticket on a
cheapo airline called Air Schlep or something to that effect. I believe
the airline's motto is Feel The Discount.

They want you to have a visceral awareness of how much money you're saving. They're thinking about a new ad campaign:

Air Schlep: So Unpleasant that Crashing Doesn't Seem So Bad, Relatively Speaking.

The darkness of our time

Last year at the Ojai Foundation, Joanna Macy in a talk explored an idea that at a glance seems so simple — obvi, if you will — but which has nonetheless refused to leave my mind.

The darkness of our time squeezes us into an awareness of our love for the world. 



IMG_6943

It's tempting to draw conclusions, and perhaps point fingers, but to sit with that; well, that's plenty…

Newspapers catch up to climate science

Or at least, The New York Times does…

Is Weather Chaos Linked to Global Warming? Probably.

"The summer’s heat waves baked the eastern United States, parts of Africa and eastern Asia, and above all Russia, which lost millions of acres of wheatand thousands of lives in a drought worse than any other in the historical record.

Seemingly disconnected, these far-flung disasters are reviving the question of whether global warming is causing more weather extremes.

The collective answer of the scientific community can be boiled down to a single word: probably."

Exciting stuff! For those of us who want to see climate science taken seriously…on the front page, no less. Where the Times goes, other publications tend to follow…

Horrific Flooding in Asia — as predicted by the IPCC

One-fifth of Pakistan is now underwater, the headlines say. Thousands have died, and this is expected to go down as one of "the worst natural disasters in history."

But how "natural" is this disaster, really? 

Just an hour ago the Associated Press posted the first news story to look at the flooding in Asia, the heat wave in Russia, and the massive ice calving in Greenland as a global whole.

How did they manage this almost unprecedented feat? As prompted by the World Meteorological Org, they simply looked at the last climate change report by the IPCC, and what it predicted.

To wit:

The weather-related cataclysms of July and August fit patterns predicted
by climate scientists, the Geneva-based World Meteorological
Organization says — although those scientists always shy from tying
individual disasters directly to global warming.

[cut]

PAKISTAN

The heaviest monsoon rains on record — 12 inches (300 millimeters) in
one 36-hour period — have sent rivers rampaging over huge swaths of
countryside. It's left 14 million Pakistanis homeless or otherwise
affected, and killed 1,500. The government calls it the worst natural
disaster in the nation's history.

A warmer atmosphere can hold — and discharge — more water. The 2007
IPCC report said rains have grown heavier for 40 years over north
Pakistan and predicted greater flooding this century in south Asia's
monsoon region.

Cassandra, meet your pals the climatologists. Talk amongst yourselves…

[pic from western Pakistan, via a New Statesman blog]

Floods7

Greenland ice sheet doomed: Richard Alley

While I was on vacation last week, nothing much seemed to happen. Oh, massive flooding in Pakistan, heat waves in Russian, but beyond disasters in foreign countries, no one I talked to recalled anything.

Today I come across a report in The Guardian that Richard Alley, perhaps this nation's premier expert in ice sheet formation and loss, told a House panel that if global temperatures rise by 2C, which is at the low end of estimates this half-century, that the Greenland ice sheet is doomed.

"Sometime in the next decade we may pass that tipping point which would
put us warmer than temperatures that Greenland can survive," Alley told a
briefing in Congress, adding that a rise in the range of 2C to 7C would
mean the obliteration of Greenland's ice sheet.

"What is going on in the Arctic now is the biggest and fastest thing that nature has ever done," he said.

If the Greenland ice sheet melts, world seas will rise by more than twenty feet, wiping numerous cities — including New Orleans, and much of lower Manhattan — off the map. 

For a more dramatic reporting, see former sceptic Michael Hanlon's story — The Crack in the Roof of the World:

Greenland is silent, almost. There is no wind, no birds, no insects;
apart from the scientists around me the world of Man is far away. But
there is sound, which you have to strain your ears to hear.

A gurgling sound, the tinkle-trickle of drains, and a deeper, Hadean roar  -  the noise of an icecap liquefying.

Sceptics
will argue that Greenland has always had moulins and meltwater rivers;
this is true. But what is new is these used to be confined to the very
edge of the icesheet, marginal, ephemeral features that lasted just a
few weeks in the height of the summer melting season. Now there are
lakes and moulins right on the centre of the cap, and persisting well
into August.

A couple of years ago Richard Alley ruminated out loud at a science conference on when the time would come to "pound on the table" and demand action on climate change.

Sounds like he thinks the time has come.

Denier claims Russian heat wave “random numbers”

According to the Russian Meterological Center, the heat wave and forest fires afflicting that nation are the worst seen in at least a thousand years.

Russia has recently seen the longest unprecedented heat
wave for at least one thousand years, the head of the Russian
Meteorological Center said on Monday….

“We have an ‘archive’ of abnormal weather situations
stretching over a thousand years. It is possible to say there was
nothing similar to this on the territory of Russia during the last one
thousand years in regard to the heat,” Alexander Frolov said.

He said scientists received information on ancient weather conditions by exploring lake deposits.

Frolov also said Russia’s grain crop may decrease by at least 30% compared to last year.

Here, via Climate Progress, is a map of two recent heat waves in Russia.

Heatwaves2003-2010

But according to leading climate change denier Pat Michaels, it's just "random numbers."

Take a look:

If the climate change appeasers have their way, we and the generations to come will all have to spend our fair share of time in a terrestrial hell.