“Unliveable in 20 years”?
A tweet from Austin, Texas got my attention the first thing this morning.
“It’s been hotter before, but this is the most miserable I can ever remember Texas weather feeling. First day of summer and the heat index is 120 at 5pm. The state is going to be unlivable in 20 years,” said freelance journalist Christopher Hooks.
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes replied, “I really think people vastly underestimate the effect that climate change is going to have on the livability of the Sun Belt.”
Saul Elbein, a staff writer for The Hill from Austin, cites the media for decades of failure to properly warn the public of the risks posed by climate change. Scientists themselves have too long “soft-pedaled” climate change, allowing motivated doubters to write them off as acceptable long-term risks:
The findings published Monday in Nature Climate Change suggest a fundamental weakness in the past 30 years of communication by climate scientists: a profound difficulty in assessing the possible impacts of breakdowns in the Earth’s biggest and most complex systems.
The Nature paper focused on sea-level rise — a hallmark of planetary heating that is influenced by a wide range of processes both well and poorly understood.
For some of these processes, “we understand the physics quite well – for example, how the ocean takes up heat and expands in response to that,” said lead author Robert Kopp, a climate scientist at Rutgers University.
Uncertainties in other global processes left room for fossil fuel producers to stall public action the way cigarette manufacturers did with their products.
If emissions remain high, the U.S. could see 6.6 feet of sea level rise by the end of the century, enough “to convert the National Mall into a national salt marsh.”
A breakdown in the ice sheets, for example, could “contribute more than one additional meter of sea level rise by 2100,” the authors wrote.
In D.C., that would be enough to swallow much of the lowlands around Capitol Hill, leaving water lapping at the base of Congress itself. It would also wipe out most of Charleston, S.C., and Miami and tear holes in the fabric of the metro areas of San Francisco, New York and Philadelphia.
But as with cigarettes, the warnings have been out there for decades. We just did not want to listen. “We” still don’t.