Are we going to see more Helenes, more 117 degree days? What is going on and what can we do for our earth, for our families at this point?
Will the extreme events happen more frequently? Yes. In fact, their occurrence is speeding up. Can we tell where they will happen? There are places that are more likely to get hit than others, but Asheville was not one of them. We are in a new era now and places some of us thought were safe, we now know are hot spots.
Climate change has always been accelerating, as the science had told us 20 years ago. Now the acceleration is hitting a new level.
What can we do about it?
1. High priority: Do everything you can to keep Donald Trump or any republican out of office. Do what you can to get a blue congress. Democratic candidates are a starting point for sustainability and climate protection. GOP candidates are keeping it worse. They are building a billionaire class who are in turn building bunkers for themselves, while they continue to get record profits for businesses that drive up global warming. A blue president and congress will also do something about SCOTUS. These are starting points.
2. Come up to speed on the science. Reading Bill McKibben (below) will help you understand in plain English how climate change works
3. Understand how to protect your home. Let's start sharing ideas here.
4. Let's talk about migration too, if that is a possibility for you. But we are dealing with new geo science in figuring out the most climate safe places. I read a few years ago that Hawaii was safest due to deep water which could modify temperature extremes. Then the Maui fire happened. Vermont was also considered a safe place after a thorough Propublica story. Now we see how the warming Atlantic dumps water on Vermont, which rushes down mountains and floods their rivers and valleys. So back to the drawing board.
I've followed McKibben since 2007 when he presented at my son's college. He is the best science writer on climate, and understands political strategy. Read him below and consider subscribing to his free emails:
"If you want to understand the horror still unfolding in Appalachia, and actually if you want to understand the 21st century, you need to remember one thing: warm air holds more water vapor than cold...
"As Hurricane Helene swept in across a superheated Gulf of Mexico, its winds rapidly intensified—that part is really easy to understand, since hurricanes draw their power from the heat in the water. And as Jeff Masters points out:
Helene’s landfall gives the U.S. a record eight Cat 4 or Cat 5 Atlantic hurricane landfalls in the past eight years (2017-2024), seven of them being continental U.S. landfalls. That’s as many Cat 4 and 5 landfalls as occurred in the prior 57 years.
"But Helene also picked up ungodly amounts of water—about 7% more water vapor in saturated air for every 1°C of ocean warming. In this case, that meant the mountaintops along the Blue Ridge above Asheville were—according to Doppler radar measurement—hit with nearly 4 feet of rain. That meant that Asheville—listed recently by the national media as a “climate haven” and bulging with those looking for a climate-safe home—is now largely cut off from the world. The interstates in and out of the town were severed for a while over the weekend; the beautiful downtown is drowned in mud. It’s obviously much worse in the outlying towns up in the surrounding hills. People forget how high these mountains are—Mt. Mitchell, near Asheville, is the highest point east of the Mississippi (and, worth noting, the forests on its summit slopes have been badly damaged by acid rain).
"I know how this works, because my home state of Vermont is mostly steep mountains and narrow valleys. Once the rain drops, it’s funneled very quickly down the saturated hillsides; placid streams become raging torrents that fill up those bottomlands, covering farm fields with soil; when the water starts to drain, everything is coated with mud. These towns are going to be cut off for a while—our mountain hamlet in Vermont was effectively isolated for a couple of weeks last summer. And these are places where cellphones don’t work in the best of times. Things get pre-modern very fast.
"Were it happening just in one place, a compassionate world could figure out how to offer effective relief. But it’s happening in so many places. The same day that Helene slammed into the Gulf, Hurricane John crashed into the Mexican state of Guerrero, dropping nearly 40 inches of rain and causing deadly and devastating floods in many places including Acapulco, which is still a shambles from Hurricane Otis last year. In Nepal this afternoon at least 148 people are dead and many still missing in the Kathmandu Valley. Just this month, as one comprehensive twitter thread documented, we’ve seen massive flooding in Turkey, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Marseilles, Milan, India, Wales, Guatemala, Morocco, Algeria, Vietnam, Croatia, Nigeria, Thailand, Greece, Romania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria, with the Danube hitting new heights across Central Europe. It is hard to open social media without seeing cellphone videos from the cars-washing-down-steep-streets genre; everywhere the flows are muddy-brown, and swirling with power.
"But all that water has to come from somewhere—the extra vapor in the air implies that in some places water is disappearing skyward, and those stories are at least as dangerous, if not as dramatic in a daily way. (How do we know that drought is on the increase? That’s easy—a new “drought emoji” of a dead tree is about to be approved).
Brazilian president Lula traveled to the Amazon last week to highlight the intense drought gripping the region; it’s fueled fires that have covered as much as 60 percent of the county with smoke. It used to be that Amazon fires were mostly the work of prospectors and would-be farmers, using the dry season to get rid of the forest; now, though, many of the fires are burning in pristine areas far from active attempts at deforestation. It just gets dry enough that the rainforest can catch fire. As Manuela Andreoni reported in the Times, Lula’s new environment minister, the highly credible Marina Silva, has cracked down on the bad guys, but it hasn’t been enough to stop the burning
“Maybe 2024 is the best year of the ones that are coming, as incredible as it may seem,” said Erika Berenguer, a senior research associate at the University of Oxford. “The climate models show a big share of the biome is going to become drier.”
In essence, the Amazon rainforest is an exquisite mechanism for passing moisture from the ocean to the interior, but as more of the forest disappears that mechanism is quickly breaking down—and with implications for regions as far away as California.
All of this is a way of saying something I’ve said too many times before: we’re out of margin. We’re now watching the climate crisis play out in real time, week by week, day by day. (117 Fahrenheit in Phoenix yesterday, the hottest September temperature ever recorded there, smashing the old daily mark by…eight degrees).
This means that our political leaders are finally going to have to make hard choices (or not, which is its own way of choosing). Brazil, for instance, is hoping to drill for oil at the mouth of the Amazon—which at least, given Brazil’s relative poverty, is somewhat understandable, if still insane. America’s politicians, under much less economic pressure, are facing similar choices, some of them as soon as the lame duck session after the November elections. Expect, for instance, a renewed push to open up new permits for LNG export terminals along the Gulf Coast. Pausing those permits was the most important step the Biden administration took to rein in Big Oil, and Houston’s been outraged ever since; it’s why they’re pouring money into the Trump campaign. And it’s why they have their errand boys in the Congress—outgoing Senator Joe Manchin, Wyoming’s John Barrasso—proposing a trade: permitting reform that would make it easier to build renewable energy in America, in exchange for ramping up LNG exports that would undercut renewable energy in Asia.
The numbers on whether this trade “makes sense” are complicated and contentious. Here’s a report from Third Way arguing yes, here’s a set of charts from the veteran energy analyst Jeremy Symons arguing that it will dramatically raise gas prices for those American consumers still tied to propane. New peer-reviewed numbers from the gold-standard methane scientist Bob Howarth at Cornell make it clear that these LNG exports are worse than coal; that prompted 125 climate scientists to write to the administration asking them to “follow the science.”
In the end, this decision will likely come down to politics. It’s not just Big Oil that’s willing to make such a trade—New Mexico’s Martin Heinrich, in line to be Democratic leader on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee when Manchin yachts back to West Virginia, has come out for the trade, assuredly because New Mexico gets a large share of its government revenues from taxing the natural gas under its part of the Permian basin. Northeastern Democrats will vote against, fearing not just climate destruction but the rise in gas prices as we send the commodity abroad. Meanwhile, the good people of the Gulf suffer from the grievous local environmental impacts of these giant plants, and the amount of methane in the atmosphere keeps rocketing up.
If Trump wins, there’s no need for a deal—the LNG projects will be approved, and permitting reform for renewables will be dead. If Harris wins and the Dems hold the Senate, at least there’s a chance that environmentalists can make it easier to build solar and wind without yielding on the massive carbon bomb and EJ disaster that is LNG export. That’s why I’m in Montana today, trying in my small way to help Jon Tester in his uphill fight to retain a Senate seat. And it’s why I’m in the swing states most of the time between now and November 5. Thousands of Third Act volunteers are deploying themselves far and wide to win this contest—you can join us on the Silver Wave tour in Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Nevada. (Please join us, even if you haven’t reached sixty yet—we don’t check IDs and we love working with young people).
The bottom line is, we’re in a terrible corner now. That’s what all those pictures of floating cars really means. We don’t have room left to make tradeoffs and deals; physics isn’t in a bargaining mood. Every battle is dishearteningly existential now. -- Bill McKibben
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This is great info @jeanne-mayell. Thank you for this informative post. I will now head off to subscribe to McKibben.
@jeanne-mayell it leaves me broken hearted when I think of it all . Today I celebrate my hero's and my birthdays. It's beyond regrettable that the GQP thwarted his second term.... he foresaw all of this years ago... https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/carter-white-house-solar-panel-array/
We, the people, were sold out a long time ago.... " the meek shall inherit the Earth" wasn't humanity I suspect.
@journeywithme2 Yes, your hero, Jimmy Carter, believed in science and when the first reports came out about the climate crisis, he took bold and brave action. He is a true patriot.
I plan to do a climate future reading session soon, as soon as we get past the election crisis. Our future will vary dramatically, depending whether we get T or Harris into the White House. Whoever wins, we must all focus on fortifying ourselves, moving away from climate hotspots, and making our homes more resilient.
Climate change is not linear. Do not draw a straight line from the current climate into the future. It is exponential, accelerating, and thus curvilinear. The longer time passes, the more steep the acceleration of storms, heat, and drought. so 117 degrees in Phoenix last week could be 127 degrees down the road, and we do not yet know what the exponent is in this exponential equation. What does that mean? Next post