AKA El Niño ushers in more and more heat
Monday 10th July 2023. I am sitting aboard our wide beam canal boat. It is warm but there’s a pleasant, refreshing breeze. Summer is here and I could have not a care in the world. But trouble is brewing on planet Earth.
Last week I thought we had the three hottest days on record. July 4th beat July 3rd and then was pipped at the post by July 5th. But it turns out that Thursday 6th July beat them all. So, the four hottest days on record. Consecutively. This is the kind of one-upmanship we can do without.
Not surprisingly, the first week of July was the hottest week on record. And this was our hottest June on record – an average of 17 C – half a degree warmer than the previous hottest June. This is a big deal in global average climate records, which are usually broken by a more genteel tenth of a degree or less.
Heatwaves are searing great swathes of north Africa, China, the USA, India. Ocean surface temperatures have broken records too – a crazy 1.5 degrees C warmer than usual this time of year. On Twitter and more sane platforms, scientists were slack-jawed at what is unfolding.
The oceans are getting hotter to greater depths now. And sea ice in the Antarctic is at record low levels. This is new – we have seen record low levels of ice in the Arctic for years, but this year the Antarctic has also come to the pool party. Biodiversity declines are constantly in the news – one of the latest dispatches to grip me was an article in the New York Times on accelerating tree loss in the Congo Basin and Amazon tropical forests. Bad for the ecosystems, bad for the people living there, bad for the world’s climate.
And let’s not even talk about the flooding – almost everywhere it seems, including northern India and Vermont – and the fires – more than 9 million hectares have burned in Canada, breaking a 34-year record. There are still three months of the fires season to go, and many fires are not even close to being controlled.
I feel a horrified sense of fascination, watching this planetary-scale demonstration of cause and effect. See what happens, humans, when we pump greenhouse gases in huge volumes and at an ever increasing rate out into the atmosphere for 150 years.
As António Guterres, UN secretary general, said, ‘Climate change is out of control.’
‘If we persist in delaying key measures that are needed, I think we are moving into a catastrophic situation,’ he added.
I watch a surreal insert on DW news about record breaking heat in Baghdad. Images are shown of men and boys cooling down in an aquatic centre. There are no apparent women or girls there. The point is made that not everyone can access this. Aha, I think, here it comes, good. But the camera moves to a teenager splashing water with a hosepipe on his younger brothers. It is they who can’t afford to go to the aquatic centre. Although one of the brothers might be a sister. A bit later in the report a dark figure in a hijab crosses the screen. Still no mention of what women or girls do to cool down.
Rachel Cleetus, policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists is asked what it would take for policy makers to act. It’s a bit disheartening says the interviewer, a middle-aged woman who is clearly not a climate denialist, when the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015. Cleetus does not answer the question directly, she understandably has no words for this, but says the alarm bells are screaming red as loud as they can.
The interviewer, it seems, is hoping Cleetus will make a strong statement when asked if this current hellscape of heat is because of climate change. She doesn’t, but agrees it is a contributing factor.
Of course, it is not just the past eight years that have seen climate inaction, it is so, so much longer ago than that. In 1992, the world agreed to tackle this situation and stabilize greenhouse gases in the atmosphere when 154 heads of state signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.
Still on the DW report, Tunisia may experience temperatures over 55 degrees, says the track of words running at the base of the screen. It’s called a rolling banner or news ticker, also known as a crawler, says Wikipedia. It evolved from the ticker tape which was an ongoing print-out of stock prices used by stock exchanges, comforting analogue technology we used before ‘tech’ came along and made everything easier and yet more intrusive.
A different interviewer tackles the same question with Professor Ragu Murtagudde from Mumbai, earth systems scientist and emeritus professor University of Maryland. It’s a combination of background global warming, says Professor Murtagudde, then El Niño comes in and adds on top of this. He explains how heat that has been accumulating in the ocean will be released and compound the problem.
‘But the other thing that’s really, really terrible’, he says, ‘is that this year by now up to June more than three times the number of hectares has been burning around the world and more than three times the amount of carbon has been released. So this is really adding to a deadly combination and we underestimate what these cascading effects can combine to create disastrous effects.’
The professor does make it quite clear that everything is now happening in a warmer world, so shorter-term climate variability, including this El Niño cycle, has the hand of global warming baked in. In other words, we can stop already with the ‘can we or can’t we attribute this directly to global heating’ debate. We have been increasing greenhouse gases for a century and a half now. As Gabriel Vecchi, a climate scientist at Princeton, said, ‘that really loads the dice’.
While El Niño can be associated with a reduced Atlantic hurricane season, the record ocean heat is likely to fuel more hurricanes in 2023, according to researchers at Colorado State University.
When asked how worried he is about the impacts of current heat waves, Professor Murtagudde reminds the interviewer it is not just about people. Impacts like extreme heat affect all species, aggravating biodiversity loss and ecosystem damages that we have wrought in other ways – through clearing land for farming and industries and settlements and roads, depriving other animals and plants of the space they need to survive.
El Niño probably won’t peak until the end of the year, after which temperatures will continue to climb for a while, so next year could be hotter than this one.
Words like ‘uncharted territory’ and ‘unprecedented’ are becoming commonplace – from the mouths of scientists.
No one is prepared for this, let alone what is still down the line. While developing countries have certainly suffered climate injustices and need to receive extra support – read money, and lots of it – the developed world has plenty of exposure and has not invested enough on adaptation. In the USA alone, around 50 million people live in areas that could have dangerous heat levels just in the next week.
Burn, baby, burn, sang The Trammps all the way back in their 1976 song. But now the heat goes beyond the disco inferno they sang about.