Several eye-catching environmental headlines sparked some map searching and perhaps soul-searching. Earth is a big, little planet with everything connected to everything else in some way. From miles away the other side of the planet. You once had to read National Geographic for news like this because, well, it was not news. That was then.
Monday’s report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states unequivocally that humans’ greenhouse gas emissions are behind the rapidly changing environment, global warming more rapid than previously predicted:
A heat wave that killed hundreds this summer in the US Northwest and British Columbia would have been “virtually impossible” without the climate crisis, researchers found. It made Hurricane Harvey’s devastating rainfall roughly three times more likely to occur and 15% more intense, scientists said. Harvey dumped more than 19 trillion gallons of water on Texas and Louisiana in 2017, triggering devastating floods in the Houston area.
The IPCC says heavy rainfall that used to occur once every 10 years now occurs 30% more frequently.
Several hikers were injured by lightning northeast of here on Friday when a fast-moving storm swept over an exposed ridge in Grandfather Mountain State Park. Seven felt the effects of a nearby lightning strike, but only four sustained injuries. All were able to hike out:
The lightning strike in North Carolina occurred a day after lightning struck a group of beachgoers at a beach in the Bronx in New York City. A 13-year-old boy died in that incident, which occurred during a fast-moving storm.
Between 20 and 29 people have died from lighting in the U.S. each year during most of the last decade, according to the National Weather Service.
In 2020, there were 17 lightning deaths, and the deadliest year since 2010 was in 2016 when 40 people died.
One wonders if these fast-moving storms will become more frequent.
Three volcanoes are erupting simultaneously in Alaska’s Aleutian chain:
“Alaska has a lot of volcanoes, and we typically see maybe one eruption every year, on average,” Matthew Loewen, a research geologist with the Alaska Volcano Observatory, told NBC News. “To have three erupting at once is less common, but it does happen.”
Devi Lockwood provides New York Times readers with a glimpse of life in remote locations where climate change is restructuring once stable lives. The ideas editor at the website Rest of World visits the island nation of Tuvalu east of the Solomon Islands. Rising seas and water scarcity are slowly making the 10-square-mile country to ponder relocating its people.
Far to the north in Igloolik, Canada, Inuits there have given up walrus hunting. Warmer waters and melting ice have driven the animals too far offshore for hunting. Polar bears, once a rare sight, have been driven closer, and now raid people’s food caches.
The sighting of an iceberg offshore of New Zealand’s South Island in 2006 was “a whisper from Antarctica” that the southern continent was melting even then. Now, changing ocean currents are sending plastic pollution farther north where it enters the food chain, killing northern birds. Geir Wing Gabrielsen studies environmental pollutants at the Norwegian Polar Institute in Tromso, Norway, Lockwood writes:
Plastic is now found not only in Arctic surface waters but also on the ocean floor and in sea ice. Dr. Gabrielsen has witnessed other changes in the ecosystem. Fjords that used to be dominated by polar species now have Atlantic species. Species that used to be farther south, like capelin, herring, mackerel and Atlantic cod, are more prominent than polar cod.
The fires and drought in the American West manifest in restaurants is Mendocino, Calif. closing their restrooms to guests. Wells have run dry. The town is trucking in water so scarce that diners must use portable toilets instead:
“We’ve grown up in this first-world country thinking that water is a given,” said Julian Lopez, the owner at Café Beaujolais, a restaurant packed with out-of-town diners in what is the height of the tourist season. “There’s that fear in the back of all our minds there is going to be a time when we don’t have water at all. And only the people with money would be able to afford the right to it.”
The interconnectedness of life on this planet is expressed most immediately and visibly in the COVID-19 pandemic that has killed over four million greenhouse-gas-generating humans. Trumpist politicians are only grudgingly admitting that reality, especially in Florida. There this week, a mother died having held her newborn child only once before the virus killed her.
As if the environment and the pandemic were not enough, this country faces both serious political and mental health crises as well. All seem driven, ultimately, by the conceit that we are all islands unto ourselves, that our actions are ours alone, and that we have no duty to or responsibility for our neighbors on this planet, be they next door or on the other side of the world.
The Me Decade that became the Me Century could end us all.