Oceans of the world are in a dangerous red zone that exceeds safe limits for marine and terrestrial life because of excessive heat. Several statements by climate scientists show heightened concerns about how this plays out, as 2023 could be a major inflection point with global warming suddenly turning much worse. For example, the recent work of Annalisa Bracco, Ph.D., Professor School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Georgia Tech, Ocean Heat Is Off The Charts – Here’s What That Means for Humans and Ecosystems Around the World, Phys.org, June 21, 2023
The backgrounder for ocean heat taking center stage includes major developed countries that haven’t done nearly enough to cool things down despite Paris ’15 commitments to cut emissions, which, in most cases. have proven to be nothing more than hollow promises, as multi-billion-dollar subsidies for fossil fuels continue unabated, no pushback for one of the most subsidized industries in the world, assuredly the most subsidized industry in the U.S.
Therefore, a question arises whether this dereliction of duty or a failure to meet Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) at the heart of the Paris Agreement, Article 4, Paragraph 2, merits an ad hoc international emergency meeting to pull out all the stops to fight global warming. After all Paris ’15 hasn’t done the job.
Two-thirds of the planet consists of ocean that’s under attack by heat-seeking missiles of human and/or natural origin of greenhouse gases, CO2, CH4, and more. There are 10 primary greenhouse gases and more beyond that. Furthermore, the oceans have absorbed 90% of global heat for far too long; it’s starting to push back, erupting throughout the planet in a preview of a climate change horror movie that’ll outdo Don’t Look Up principally because Don’t Look Up’s asteroid was instantaneous with a precise target, whereas, global warming’s a thousand cuts across the planet; it hits everywhere.
Based upon the script for Don’t Look Up (2021 Best Picture Nominee), leaders of the world should be held accountable for ignoring science, which is clearly exposed for all to see in the film version starring Meryl Streep, Leonardo DiCaprio, Cate Blanchett, and Jennifer Lawrence. World leaders knew but did nothing. They must have known, not the actors, but real-world leaders that attended annual Conference of the Parties -COP- climate meetings, over 100 world leaders at COP27 last year, with UN Secretary-General António Guterres warning, time and again, and again, and again, ad nauseum: “The world is headed for climate catastrophe without urgent action.”
We now know that most world leaders sought photo ops, nothing more! Here’s the proof: Global emissions, the feedstock for global warming, continue setting new records every year. Only humans can control this. In May 2023, CO2 hit a new record high of 424 ppm according to Mauna Loa monthly mean data by NOAA Monitoring Lab. As a result, ocean heat is off the charts, puzzling climate scientists, wondering whether it’s a temporary phenomenon or a new era of devastating global heat sweeping the world that won’t stop. Ocean temperatures are the highest in the 40 years of satellite monitoring.
The North Atlantic had its warmest May in over 150 years, up to 9°F above normal, registered by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) as Category 4 “extreme” and Category 5 “beyond extreme”. Alarmingly, water temps in early June soared even higher than in May. “The North Atlantic heat wave is part of a rapid warming of global ocean waters since March that has scientists confused about the cause and concerned about its impacts.” (Source: ‘Beyond Extreme’ Ocean Heat Wave in North Atlantic is Worst in 170 Years, Boston Globe, June 23, 2023)
“NOAA said in a report last week… it appears to have continued at a record pace during June. The chance of seeing such warm sea surface temperatures is 1-in-256,000 according to Brian McNoldy, a hurricane researcher at the University of Miami, who said, ‘this is beyond extraordinary,” Ibid.
According to Dr. Annalisa Bracco/Georgia Tech: “The impact is breaking through in disruptive ways around the world.” For example, the Sea of Japan is a staggering 4°C above average, and Indian monsoons are way below normal strength, thus depleting South Asian crops. The marine heatwave along the eastern North Atlantic inhibits rainfall across Spain, France, England, and the whole of the Scandinavian peninsula. Sea surface temps are running 1-3°C above normal from Europe to the coast of Africa.
El Niño is starting to come into play as equatorial Pacific Ocean warm waters weaken trade winds in the tropics, affecting oceans around the world. The past three years of La Niña with cooler equatorial Pacific waters is over and no longer masking global warming.
A major contributor is abnormally low Arctic sea ice. A dark water background absorbs enormous quantities of solar radiation in contrast to ice that reflects 80-90% back to outer space. Alas, the world’s largest reflector of solar radiation has been humbled by global warming. There is a school of thought making the rounds that the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans are merging with negative implications for sea life and weather patterns for the entire Northern Hemisphere going haywire.
Dr. Bracco visited NORCE climate center in Bergen, Norway in June for two weeks to meet other ocean scientists. Warm waters across the eastern North Atlantic resulted in sunny, hot weather in Scandinavia when typically up to 70% of days experience downpours, but not now. As a result, the agricultural sector of Norway is preparing for drought conditions as bad as four years ago when they lost 40% of crop yield.
Dr. Bracco’s experience included a trip across the country: “Our train from Bergen to Oslo had a two-hour delay because the brakes of one car overheated and the 90 F (32 C) temperatures approaching the capital were too high to allow them to cool down.”
Ocean heat is hitting South Asia especially hard. Ironically, India felt compelled in 2022 to reopen >100 coal mines to meet energy demands for artificial cooling of buildings, as overloaded grids and widespread power outages hit well ahead of this year’s onslaught. Thereby, global warming brings forth a vicious Sisyphean frustration cycle, forcing humans to burn additional fossil fuels emitting more CO2 to stay cool but enhancing buildup of more heat. It’s a horrendous losing proposition, comparable to Sisyphus repeatedly trying to roll a boulder up the mountainside only to see it roll back down.
A recent CNN headline focused on human risks: Humans Approaching Limits of ‘Survivability’ as Swelting Heatwaves Engulf Parts of Asia, CNN, June 26, 2023. It conforms to a recent UN IPCC warning: “Increased heatwaves, droughts and floods are already exceeding plants’ and animals’ tolerance thresholds. These weather extremes are occurring simultaneously, causing cascading impacts that are increasingly difficult to manage.” (Source: In South Asia, Record Heat Threatens Future of Farming, UN Environment Programme, June 26, 2023)
“Limits of survivability” and “exceeding plant and animal tolerance thresholds” are phrases that increasingly haunt news stories throughout the world. When does this become an emergency?
What’s the next step for the world’s political leaders? Oh yes, of course, UNFCCC COP28 convenes November 30-December 12, 2023, in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE), a global climate event (in oil-rich Dubai) expecting over 140 heads of state, over 80,000 delegates and 5,000 media professionals, which will be record COP turnout with more heavy-duty-brass than attended the Super Bowl. You gotta wonder how hard they’ll debate the brutal impact of 37B tons of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere in 2022, up 50% since 25B tons was emitted in 2000 and a 7-fold increase since 5B tons was emitted in 1950 (Source: How the World Passed a Carbon Threshold and Why It Matters, YaleEnvironment360, January 24, 2017).
Thus far, within one human lifetime the scorecard for annual CO2 emissions is progressively 5 billion tons, 25 billion tons, 37 billion tons.
Robert Hunziker is a freelance writer and environmental journalist whose articles have been translated into foreign languages and published in over 50 journals, magazines and sites worldwide.
The evidence is starting to build that all bets are off on predictions that humanity has a decade, or more, of clear sailing before global warming turns vicious enough to run roughshod over climate change deniers and the mean-spirited anti-climate-change Republican Party. Voters better smarten up by 2024 or suffer the consequences. At least the Democrats enacted a partial baby-sized climate bill. Give’em credit.
Recent reports from Copernicus, the EU Earth Observation Programme, and Dr. James Hansen, Earth Institute Columbia University, point to the risks of an earlier than expected upside breakout of the 1.5°C (2.7°F) limit set by the Paris Agreement of 2015 and endorsed by 195 countries. Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Agreement but Biden put the U.S. back in. Trump is 99% anti-science, maybe 100%.
Conclusively, coastal cities of the world should move up target dates for building seawalls. But how many seawalls are on drawing boards? A recent UN report (2022) finds that communities around the world haven’t done nearly enough to prepare for climate change (IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, Climate change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability).
Restoring wetlands, which act as natural sponges, should be prioritized. Most wetlands have been paved over or plowed under. Coastal cities are not even close to being prepared for ocean flooding episodes, which will one day be greeted by tens of thousands of pissed off citizens stacking sandbags, or will they pack it in and head out for higher territory? They’ll pack it in.
A recent YaleEnvironment360 headline: As 1.5 Degrees Looms, Scientists See Growing Risk of Runaway Warming, Urgent Need to Slash Emissions, March 15, 2023. It’s a nice headline but forget it; slashing emissions has never happened, and it won’t until lower Manhattan floods for good. Factually, “an urgent need to slash emissions” is not anywhere to be found. It’s just simply not happening.
Sure, auto manufacturers are ga-ga about electric cars. Just imagine the revenue stream from replacing a worldwide fleet of gas guzzlers and yes, solar and wind are on the go. But several factors beyond EVs and solar are key to the reality of progression or decline, as fossil fuel emissions hit a new record in 2022, and ocean heat, where most of the heat is stored, hit new highs in 2022.
Significantly, maybe most importantly, carbon uptake by natural ecosystem channels has taken a big hit with degraded lands and overused waters taking up less and less CO2: “Carbon uptake by oceans has fallen 4 percent, while uptake by land has fallen 17 percent… and the challenge is likely to grow more severe.” (Source: As 1.5 Degrees Looms, Scientists See Growing Risk of Runaway Warming, Urgent Need to Slash Emissions, YaleEnvironment360, March 15, 2023).
That’s what happens when ecosystems are destroyed, ignored, or abused as if garbage dumps. Frankly, it’s the history of how life-sourcing ecosystems throughout the world are treated, and now natural carbon uptake has been severely crippled. It must be restored, or there’s no chance to successfully battle global warming. Direct Air Capture of CO2 can’t do the job for several reasons beyond the scope of this article.
Copernicus’s most recent broadside explains current global warming, rather bluntly: “Global-mean surface air temperatures for the first days of June 2023 were the highest in the ERAS data record for early June by a substantial margin, following a May during which sea-surface temperatures were at unprecedented levels for the time of year.” (Source: Tracking Breaches of the 1.5°C Global Warming Threshold, Copernicus, June 15, 2023)
According to the report, the global-mean temperature breached the 1.5°C limit during the first week of June. However, whether this early breach holds up going forward will be monitored. According to Copernicus: “The 1.5C and 2.0C limits set in the Paris Agreement are targets for the average temperature of the planet over the twenty or thirty-year periods typically used to define climate.” Meanwhile, breaches of 1.5C are occurring with more and more regularity.
Additionally, an incipient El Niño Pacific Ocean warming cycle is on the immediate horizon and will bring unwelcomed hottish tailwinds, cranking up temperatures even more. As such, 2023-24 could be worse than 2022, but how could it be any worse for Europe? Answer: Rather than one-hundred, hundreds upon hundreds of parched communities without tap water and all commercial barges stuck in mud.
James Hansen’s recent email letter, El Nino and Global Warming Acceleration, June 14, 2023, points to the impact of the Faustian bargain whereby clean energy displaces fossil fuel particulate matter, aka: the global dimming curse (Stanhill, 2006). As stated by Hansen: “The principal mechanism that may cause acceleration of global warming is a decrease of human-caused aerosols (particulate air pollution), which reflect sunlight and thus have a cooling effect that partially offsets warming by greenhouse gases (GHGs).
The Faustian bargain, i.e., human-generated particulates removed from the sky via mitigation of greenhouse gas sources paradoxically means: “We have suggested that a significant payment in accelerated global warming is now coming due.” For example, particulate matter that reflects sun radiation has decreased as the International Maritime Organization set strict limits on the sulfur content of ship fuels. Thus, removing a horrible sore point of global warming brings on more global warming! The Faustian Bargain at work.
Of special interest, according to Hansen: “There has been a staggering increase in Earth’s energy imbalance (EEI)… About 90% of the change of EEI is change of the heat content of the ocean, which is sampled by a fleet of about 4000 deep-diving Argo floats. Earth’s energy imbalance was 0.71 W/m2 during the 10-year calibration period, but EEI has subsequently increased to well over 1 W/m2.”
EEI is the driving force for global warming. Consequently, Hansen’s dot-plot yellow graph appears to place 1.5°C smack dab into the mid 2020s. That’s way-way ahead of schedule and should rattle the cages of world leaders.
Beyond 1.5°C things get dicey crazy scary triggering tipping points that could bring runaway global warming more directly to expressways, businesses and living rooms. Europe has already experienced this as EU temperatures are 2-times hotter than the global average (World Meteorological Organization).
For example, with last year’s temperatures one of the hottest years on record, the EU was a climate train wreck. Commercial barges sputtered in the mud of major European waterways, the Rhine, and the Danube whilst Italy and France furiously delivered drinking water via truck to over 100 parched out-of-tap-water communities. What’ll it be like when things get bad?
Cynically, one must wonder where leadership comes into play. Scientists have been warning Congress and the executive branch for years that fossil fuel emissions will be the end game for the great American experiment in social democracy. Republicans across the board make fun of climate change and oil companies filter dark money into their campaign buckets, as global warming is sold down the drain to the highest bidders. This is a horrifying mess but who’ll take the blame when it hits the fan?
Robert Hunziker is a freelance writer and environmental journalist whose articles have been translated into foreign languages and published in over 50 journals, magazines and sites worldwide.
When one of the world’s most developed culturally elite countries, France, tosses in the towel on the IPCC 2°C barrier, it sends a loud and clear message that the global warming fight is losing the battle.
Seriously, France expects 4°C. The country is bracing for 4°C according to Environment Minister Christophe Béchu: “We can’t escape the reality of global warming.” (Source: ‘We Can’t Escape the Reality’: France is Preparing for 4°C of Warming by 2100, Euronews.green, May 22, 2023).
France’s position on global warming is heavily influenced by other countries failing to deliver their targets to keep temperatures within the 1-5°C-2°C range of the Paris Agreement. “Unless countries around the world intensify their efforts to cut emissions further still, we are on track for global warming of between +2.8 and +3.2 degrees on average, which means +4 degrees for France because Europe is warming fast,” Béchu said,” Ibid.
The question going forward will be how to keep the electrical grid functioning as global warming diminishes water resources crucial for nuclear power, and as the aging fleet corrodes (37 years median age). France leads the world in nuclear power at 70% of total electricity generation. Yet, in a strange twist of fate, nuclear power, falsely advertised as clean green energy, is vulnerable to global warming shutdowns.
The French Court of Auditors’ Report on the Safety and Operation of France’s Fifty-six (56) Reactors highlights an increasingly unstable supply of water necessary for cooling reactors. (Source: Climate Change, Water Scarcity Jeopardizing French Nuclear Fleet, Balkan Green Energy News, March 24, 2023)
The Loire River is the longest river in France at 625 miles. As of early 2023, global warming clobbered the river, some areas completely dry with flow rate down to 1/20th of normal. Significantly, some of the country’s nuclear power plants depend upon the river for cooling purposes. Global warming is threatening France’s nuclear power system. So far, forced shutdowns have only occurred in the summer, but France’s Court of Auditors warned that such events are likely to become 3-to-4 times more frequent unless global warming somehow subsides, yet France’s environmental chief thinks 4°C is on the horizon.
Moreover, for the first time since 1980, France has been a net importer of electricity, losing its 40-year net exporter status. Output shrank 23% because of a double whammy: (1) global warming diminished water resources, and (2) corrosive defects in infrastructure as a result of the tension and stress of creating energy via nuclear fission, as a dozen reactors were shutdown. One-half of France’s nuclear fleet was shut down at times during 2022.
In the face of its most challenging hottest year on record, France is throwing in the towel on 1.5°C and 2°C above pre-industrial, the upper band as suggested by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Notably, anything above 2°C is considered trouble for life-supporting ecosystems. In fact, the world today at only 1.2°C above pre-industrial is already experiencing trouble in many instances, e.g., losing the water towers of Europe, the Alps, way too fast. The European continent runs hotter than the world at large. According to the World Meteorological Organization, temperatures in Europe have increased at more than twice the global average over the past 30 years. Meanwhile, with global warming walloping Europe last year, it nearly slid off the map.
With France convinced 4°C is in its future, it should be noted that there are plenty of credible scientists who believe 2°C above pre-industrial is simply intolerable, hmm. For example: A recent study entitled Assessing Dangerous Climate Change by James Hansen (Columbia University) Jeffrey Sachs (Columbia University) Camille Parmesan (University of Plymouth), et al (18 scientists) claims that governments have set the wrong target to limit climate change at “2°C higher than the average for most of human history… consequences can be described as disastrous.” With a 2°C increase “sea level rise of several meters could be expected,” and several species will be decimated.
The Hansen study pulls no punches, 2°C above pre-industrial is too high. It should be noted that Dr. Hansen correctly warned the U. S. Senate in 1988 of the dangers of global warming, subsequently front-page news for the New York Times: “The greenhouse effect has been detected and is changing our climate now.” His warnings then as head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies are evident today. If only America’s highest-ranking politicians had listened and reacted, but they didn’t.
France is taking on the global warming challenge by opening a public consultation process thru the summer months to work at defining a nationwide adaptation plan as global warming is expected to trigger several events: (1) severe heatwaves will last up to two months (2) southern portions of the country can expect up to 90 nights with tropical temperatures per year (3) the west and south will experience longer more extreme droughts (4) water shortages will become severe.
2022 Hottest Year Since 1900
National weather agency Météo-France claims 2022 ranks as the hottest year ever recorded in France since data collection began in 1900. It was a year (2022) of multiple extreme disasters as excessive global warming hit hard, e.g., three suffocating heat waves over 33 days, temperature records smashed with many cities exceeding 40°C. (Source: 2022: The Hottest Year Ever Recorded in France, Le Monde, Jan. 6, 2023)
“France is gasping from a dire water shortage with hundreds of towns and villages left with no tap water as ‘ogre’ wildfires rip across the country for the second time this summer in a ‘vision of hell’… The entire nation is suffering its worst drought on record with restrictions in place to limit water usage, but for more than 100 parched communes, they don’t even have the option to ration their supply. French environment minister Christophe Béchu said it is a ‘historic’ crisis for so many communities to have no tap water at all, as fleets of vans ferry bottled water to the desperate residents. (Source: ‘Monster’ Wildfire Incinerates French Wine Country: France Desperately Sends in Reinforcement Firefighters as Ten Thousand Flee, While Record Drought Helps Kill Tons of Fish in Germany Amid Summer ‘Extremes Not Seen Before, Daily Mail, August 11,2022)
The ’vision of hell’ experience and trucking water to hundreds of parched communities is/was a wakeup call, and that experience “has prompted concerns over water security across the continent.” (Source: France Heading Towards Worse Summer Drought Than 2022, Geological Service Says, Reuters, April 13, 2023)
If 2022 was a disaster year with Europe’s temps above the global average of 1.2°C pre-industrial, what on earth can the French expect with 4°C looming?
A 4C World
The World Wildlife Foundation published a study of various scenarios of temperature ranges: Backgrounder: Comparing climate impacts at 1.5°C, 2°C, 3°C and 4°C.
4°C looks like this: (1) 3/4ths of the world population will have deadly temperatures for at least 20 days every year, e.g., a heatwave in Karachi, Pakistan killed 1300 people in 2015; at 4°C Karachi would get hit with deadly heat for 40 days straight. (2) major portions of the world will be hit with horrific food shortages (3) all of Europe will experience water shortages (4) hundreds of millions of people at risk of sea level rise with 760 million in high-risk coastal city locations (5) one-half of all plant and animal species at risk of local extinction, and alas (6) adaptation to 4°C may not be possible. In which case the first 5 examples may not matter all that much!
According to a World Bank analysis: “There is no certainty that adaptation to a 4°C world is possible…the projected 4°C warming simply must not be allowed to occur,” Ibid.
Even with worldwide awareness of global warming, it is still important to recognize the fact that climate change is a fickle public issue with plenty of ammunition for deniers and doubters to cast spells: “not to worry, the climate always changes.”
Studies suggest that people, not wanting to deal with a nearly impossible situation, block out the challenges of climate change. And as such, they are susceptible to any public statement that gives some comfort that it’s not all that bad. For example, “the climate always changes,” implying that it’s done this same thing over and over again, but we are still standing. However, that statement leaves out a crucial fact. It leaves out the rate of change. It’s one thing when it takes a thousand years to naturally increase CO2 at the rate of 0.02 ppm per year, thus impacting temperature levels gradually. It’s an altogether different case when its human-driven 100 times faster at 2.0 ppm, which is today’s rate, thus compressing 1,000 years into 10-to-100 years. From most signals in France today, the compression factor is looking more severe yet, just ask France’s environmental minister about the rate of change.
Excessive levels of greenhouse gases are the culprit: “In the 1960s, the global growth rate of atmospheric carbon dioxide was roughly 0.8± 0.1 ppm per year. Over the next half century, the annual growth rate tripled, reaching 2.4 ppm per year during the 2010s. The annual rate of increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide over the past 60 years is about 100 times faster than previous natural increases, such as those that occurred at the end of the last ice age 11,000-17,000 years ago.” (Source: Climate Change: Atmosphere Carbon Dioxide, Climate.gov, May 12, 2023)
Here’s more unsettling paleoclimate history from Climate. gov: “Carbon dioxide levels today are higher than at any point in human history. In fact, the last time atmospheric carbon dioxide amounts were this high was more than 3 million years ago, during the Mid-Pliocene Warm Period, when global surface temperature was 4.5–7.2 degrees Fahrenheit (2.5–4 degrees Celsius) warmer than during the pre-industrial era. Sea level was at least 16 feet higher than it was in 1900 and possibly as much as 82 feet higher.”
To repeat the facts just described in the former paragraph, which are difficult to accept: Three million years ago, atmospheric CO2 was the same as today. It was 2.5-4°C warmer than today’s pre-industrial basis with sea levels at least 16 feet higher.
Maybe France is right, 4C could be low. Only time will tell. Today’s global heat is a product of CO2 from a decade ago. There’s a lag time that’s roughly 10+ years (source: Institute of Physics) between CO2 emissions and the subsequent temperature impact… buckle up!
Meanwhile, when nuclear power plants go down and drinking water is delivered via truck to hundreds of cities and towns in G7 countries, like Italy and France, the underlying message is silent and unspoken. There’s nothing more to say.
A Cool Solution
James Hansen has issued a draft paper entitled Global Warming in the Pipeline, Cornell University, May 2023 that answers the question of what must be done. An enormous drawdown of CO2 is required to cool the planet: “A new plan is essential. The plan must cool the planet to preserve our coastlines. Even today’s temperature would cause eventual multimeter sea level rise, and a majority of the world’s large and historic cities are on coastlines. Cooling will also address other major problems caused by global warming.”
Robert Hunziker is a freelance writer and environmental journalist whose articles have been translated into foreign languages and published in over 50 journals, magazines and sites worldwide.
The Supreme Court is effectively axing a major component of the Clean Water Act, rolling back 50 years of wetland protection in a declaration of war against nature by changing a word in the text of the Clean Water Act.
Seldom, if ever, will repercussions of a Supreme Court decision be so far-reaching and detrimental to life for the planet. It’s a dagger strike deep into the heart of the world’s most significant life source. Alito changing the text of the Clean Water Act is guaranteed to bring forth much, much worse flooding, especially along coastlines as sea levels rise from global warming; it’ll engender new sources of pollution of streams and lakes and bring on huge losses in biodiversity and crush the beauty of nature displaced by concrete, asphalt and development. Most importantly, aquifers depend upon wetlands for replenishment.
The Supreme Ct ruling in Sackett v. EPA effectively reverses what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -IPCC- stands for in its fight against climate change and global warming’s impact on the planet’s life support ecosystems.
Wetlands are warriors. By far, the most effective fighters against the ravages of climate change, for example, they are: (1) carbon sinks that sequester 10 times more carbon than mature tropical forests; studies show they outperform lame, insufficient carbon capture and sequestration machines, which will never get the job done (2) natural line of defense against flooding (3) home to 40% of all the world’s species (4) a major component for nature’s hydrology system, filtering/cleansing water for streams and lakes and most significantly, replenishing aquifers. Without wetlands, rainfall follows concrete, asphalt, development channels away from aquifers. NASA claims 1/3rd of the world’s largest aquifers to be dangerously stressed, e.g., portions of the Ogallala aquifer in the Texas Panhandle have gone dry and in west-central Kansas the Ogallala aquifer has gone dry. The Ogallala is the largest aquifer, by volume, in the world, underlying 8 states.
Hurricane Sandy, one of the worst storms to hit the East Coast in 2012 was checked by wetlands, e.g., according to Zurich Insurance, the four states with the most wetland coverage had flood damage reduced by up to 30% compared to unprotected areas. In New Jersey, with only 10% wetland coverage, the state saved $430M in flood damage because of wetland protection. (Source: Why Are Wetlands Important to People and Planet? Zurich, February 2, 2023)
“The world’s wetlands are some of our most biodiverse and important ecosystems,” John Scott, Head of Sustainability Risk at Zurich Insurance Group.
“The Court’s decision will open millions of acres of wetlands—all formerly protected by the Clean Water Act—to pollution and destruction,” the Sierra Club.
In the Sacketts’ case, the Supremes ruled that the Clean Water Act only concerns wetlands that are connected to larger bodies of water such as oceans, rivers and lakes. Anything adjacent doesn’t count.
The Biden administration disagrees: “The Supreme Court’s disappointing decision in Sackett v. EPA will take our country backwards,’ Biden said in a statement.” (Source: US Supreme Court Deals Setback to Clean Water Law, Phys.org, May 25, 2023)
“It puts our nation’s wetlands—and the rivers, streams, lakes, and ponds connected to them—at risk of pollution and destruction, jeopardizing the sources of clean water that millions of American families, farmers, and businesses rely on,’ the president said,” Ibid.
The Sackett decision literally re-writes congressional legislation. Brett Kavanaugh took exception, scolding Samuel Alito for taking liberties with congressional law, changing text by crossing out the word ‘adjacent” and replacing it to effectively say: Yes, landowners have as much latitude as they deem necessary to disrupt, destroy, and build upon the planet’s most valuable ecosystems.
“Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion for the court is remarkably brazen about this approach—so brazen that Justice Brett Kavanaugh (of all people!) authored a sharp opinion accusing him of failing to “stick to the text.” (Source: Samuel Alito’s Assault on Wetlands Is So Indefensible That He Lost Brett Kavanaugh, Slate, May 25, 2023)
“The court has anointed itself the final arbiter of every controversy in the land, and if it thinks the Clean Water Act goes too far, then, well, it’s the court’s sacred duty to rewrite it. As Kagan put it ruefully: ‘That is not how I think our government should work,’ because ‘it is not how the Constitution thinks our government should work.” Ibid.
But isn’t the Court supposed to follow the Constitution? Not this Court.
Robert Hunziker is a freelance writer and environmental journalist whose articles have been translated into foreign languages and published in over 50 journals, magazines and sites worldwide.
Small Modular Reactors (SMR) are the new nuclear craze, especially with the U.S. Congress, as America’s representatives see SMRs as a big answer to energy needs and reduction of greenhouse gases, advertised as a green deal for clean energy that skirts the heavy costs of paying the Middle East billions upon billions. However, the devil in the details is dangerously overlooked.
Notable nuclear accidents: NRX (1952) Kyshtym (1957) Windscale (1957) SL-1 (1961) Wood River Junction (1964) K-27 (1968) Three Mile Island (1979) Constituyentes (1983) Mohammedia (1984) K-431 (1985) Chernobyl (1986) Tokai (1997, 1999) Fukushima (2011) … but wait, hundreds, possibly thousands, of Small Modular Reactors (nuclear SMRs) are about to pop up around the world. What could possibly go wrong?
“Multiple and unexpected failures are built into society’s complex and tightly coupled nuclear reactor systems. Such accidents are unavoidable and cannot be designed around.” (Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents (Princeton University Press, 1999)
“On dozens of occasions because of human error or technical miscue or active threat, the world has come dangerously close to the brink of nuclear conflagration… it is a terrifying history of which most people remain ignorant.” (Julian Cribb, How to Fix a Broken Planet, Cambridge University Press, 2023.)
Should nuclear power really circumnavigate the planet with mini-power plants?
For Germany, which closed its last three nuclear plants in April 2023, the country’s Federal Office for the Safety of Nuclear Waste Management conducted a study: “SMRs have been the subject of repeated discussion in recent times. They promise cheap energy, safety, and little waste. BASE commissioned an expert report (in German) to evaluate these concepts and the risks associated with them. The report provides a scientific assessment of possible areas of application and the associated safety issues. It concludes that the construction of SMRs is only economically viable for a very large number of units and poses significant risks if widely deployed.”
Yet, “resistance to nuclear power is starting to ebb around the world with support from a surprising group: environmentalists… This change of heart spans the globe, and is being prompted by climate change, unreliable electrical grids and fears about national security in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.” (Source: Why Even Environmentalists are Supporting Nuclear Power Today, NPR, August 30, 2022
U.S. senators recently introduced a nuclear energy bill called the Advance Act with bipartisan support, hopefully enhancing and advancing America’s world leadership role in nuclear energy by deploying SMRs by the bucketful, idealized as a “cleaner smarter safer solution” to today’s bulky nuclear power plants. Advance Act will cut red tape and make it easier and much faster for SMRs to gain a foothold in the marketplace.
Meanwhile, like the U.S., China has the same red hot nuclear fever. It has set aside $440B for its nuclear program, planning to build 150 new reactors by 2037, which equates to 10 per year, which, by almost all standards, seems unachievable. It tops cumulative world production over the past three decades.
Fearful of being left in China’s nuclear dust, on May 18th, a proposed House bill by Wittman (R-VA) speeds-up the building process for SMRs. And Joe Manchin (D-WV) has proposed the Nuclear Fuel Security Act to set up a nuclear fuel security program promoting domestic production of uranium.
The excitement over nuclear is palpable, as politicians’ hands tremble with excitement, introducing what’s billed as the perfect green clean way to solve energy needs. There are cheerleaders galore. The U.S. Congress for one is a very influential cheerleading group, but it’s more pervasive than that. Big players like Japan and China are going all-in for nuclear. Japan Adopts Plan to Maximize Nuclear Energy, in Major Shift, AP News, December 22, 2022.
Wait a moment… isn’t Japan currently being criticized in several quarters of the world for dumping Fukushima toxic radioactive water into the ocean? After all, the U.S. National Association of Marine Laboratories, with over 100 member laboratories, issued a position paper strongly opposing the toxic dumping because of a lack of adequate and accurate scientific data in support of Japan’s assertions of safety.
Regardless, last week the G7 nations gave its blessing for Japan to dump Fukushima’s toxic water into the Pacific Ocean. Hmm.
Interestingly, PM Shinzo Abe (1954-2022) shortly after Fukushima’s meltdown 10 years ago, assured the International Olympic Committee in consideration of holding the games in Tokyo, that “everything was under control.” Notwithstanding numerous assurances by Japanese authorities of no harm, no foul, over the years, several independent journalists in Japan have reported numerous deaths because of the Fukushima meltdown and its aftermath but never acknowledged by the government. Assurances are not always assurances!
Therefore, it’s only fair that the darker side of nuclear cheerleading — yea yea yea no nuclear no nuclear — deserves some notoriety. For starters, the results of a recent study by Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, May 31, 2022, entitled Nuclear Waste from Small Modular Reactors.
Stanford News also published the study: Sandford-led Research Finds Small Modular Reactors Will Exacerbate Challenges of Highly Radioactive Nuclear Waste. The study concludes that SMRs will generate more radioactive waste than conventional nuclear power plants. Stanford and the University of British Columbia jointly conducted the study, e.g., SMRs will be manufactured in factories and industry analysts claim SMRs will be cheaper and produce fewer radioactive byproducts than the big bulky conventional reactors; however, the study discovered the upsetting fact that, pound-for-pound when compared to the big bulky conventional nuclear plants, SMRs will increase nuclear waste… considerably!
“Our results show that most small modular reactor designs will actually increase the volume of nuclear waste in need of management and disposal, by factors of 2 to 30 for the reactors in our case study,” said study lead author Lindsay Krall, a former MacArthur Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation: “These findings stand in sharp contrast to the cost and waste reduction benefits that advocates have claimed for advanced nuclear technologies.” (Stanford study)
U.S. nuclear plants have already produced over 88,000 metric tons of “spent nuclear fuel” with nowhere to put it other than risky open pools of water at plant locations and some dry casks setups. Throughout America nuclear facilities contain open pools of spent fuel rods. According to Paul Blanch: “Continual storage in spent fuel pools is the most unsafe thing you could do.” (Paul Blanch, registered professional engineer, US Navy Reactor Operator & Instructor with 55 years of experience with nuclear engineering and regulatory agencies, widely recognized as one of America’s leading experts on nuclear power)
Accordingly, “the most highly radioactive waste, mainly spent fuel rods, will have to be isolated in deep-mined geologic repositories for hundreds of thousands of years. At present, the U.S. has no program to develop a geologic repository, after spending decades and billions of dollars on the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada. As a result, spent nuclear fuel is currently stored in pools or in dry casks at reactor sites, accumulating at a rate of about 2,000 metric tonnes per year.” (Stanford)
Nobody wants it in their backyard. Furthermore, what’s the message behind the fact that humanity has humiliatingly endangered itself by utilizing the most potent toxic material on Earth to boil water that results in highly radioactive spent fuel rods that can only be stored in deep-deep geologic repositories as far away from civilization as possible, locked away for centuries upon centuries? Rubbing two sticks together a million years ago was much smarter.
The Stanford study claims that few, if any, developers of SMR have analyzed the management and disposal of nuclear waste. “The study concludes that, overall, small modular designs are inferior to conventional reactors with respect to radioactive waste generation, management requirements, and disposal options.”
Meanwhile, SMRs are about to enter a world of nuclear power that has sharp critics. For example, crib notes of a detailed analysis of nuclear by Greenpeace, which has considerable nuclear expertise on staff, provides an offset to the ringing applause around the world for SMRs: 6 Reasons Why Nuclear Energy is not the Way to a Green and Peaceful World d/d March 18, 2022.
Greenpeace is not at all hesitant about exposing the “myths being perpetuated by the nuclear industry.”
For starters the scale of proposed nuclear energy installations does not come close to meeting the needs to go to net zero emissions in a timely fashion, according to projections by the World Nuclear Association, greenhouse gas emissions would only drop by 4% by 2050, assuming 37 new large nuclear reactors brought onto the grid per year from now to 2050. Yet only 57 new reactors are schedule for construction over the next 15 years. A number for SMRs is unknown currently.
Nuclear power plants are extremely dangerous as easy targets for terrorists, cyberattacks or acts of war. Moreover, they are unique hazards for accidents by nature like Fukushima and/or by human error like Chernobyl, and some accidents never go away.
“For the first time in history, a major war is being waged in a country with multiple nuclear reactors and thousands of tons of highly radioactive spent fuel. The war in southern Ukraine around Zaporizhzhia puts them all at heightened risk of a severe accident…. Nuclear power plants are some of the most complex and sensitive industrial installations, which require a very complex set of resources in ready state at all times to keep them operational,” Ibid.
Nuclear power plants are a water-hungry technology that must, must, must have a lot of water to cool the radioactive hot stuff. Nuclear power facilities are vulnerable to water stress, warming rivers, and rising temperatures. Facilities in the US and France have often been shut down during heatwaves or have scaled down activity, especially France’s shakiness in 2022. Global warming is nuclear power’s biggest enemy.
And, then there’s this: “Electricite de France SA’s fleet of 56 atomic power plants has long been the backbone of Europe’s energy system, but in 2022 it was more of a millstone. As reactors were shut down to fix cracked pipes, the company’s nuclear power generation slumped to the lowest since 1988, making the region more dependent on fossil fuels just as Russia squeezed natural gas exports.” (Source: French Nuclear Revival Hits Trouble as New Reactor Defects Found, Bloomberg March 10, 2023)
Not only does nuclear power put enormous stress on structural facilities, a huge incalculable risk, but water flowing past the nuclear fuel in the reactor cores gets heated to over 500°F. It can be heated to this temperature because it is pressurized to over 1,000 pounds per square inch (psi). The reactor vessel and its attached piping must be robust to remain intact and contain this high-pressure fluid. Abnormally high pressure can break even robust containers. (Union of Concerned Scientist) The strongest known pressure relief valves and piping must endure enormous pressure 24/7/365. This is an extreme high-risk category of nuclear operations.
Nuclear energy is also too expensive. According to a World Nuclear Industry Status Report, nuclear energy per MWh (megawatt-hour) costs 3-to-5 times more than wind or solar. Moreover, according to the same source, total costs of building and running a plant to lifetime for utility scale operations over the past decade have dropped by 88% for solar and by 69% for wind whilst nuclear has increased by 23%. Duh!
“Stabilizing the climate is an emergency. Yet, Nuclear Power is slow” (Greenpeace). The World Nuclear Industry Status Report says is takes 10 years on average in the world to construct a plant.
It’s impossible to get around the issue of radioactive waste, which is a huge problem that haunts the industry. Some isotopes remain highly radioactive for several thousand years. What to do with it? The costs are outrageous. The US Energy Dept. projected cost for long-term nuclear waste cleanup jumped more than $100B in just one year. According to Stanford’s study, SMRs will exaggerate this problem by factors of 2-to-30. (Stanford study)
But, of course there’s always the easy way out of handling toxic waste: According to a Greenpeace International 2021 Tweet: “French companies are exporting nuclear waste to Siberia dumping barrels in unsafe conditions completely exposed to the elements.” Hmm.
Moreover, it’s oxymoronic to claim nuclear power is “sustainable green energy” and should be eligible for green funding. Oh, please! Only radioactive waste is sustainable. Interestingly, in 2021 Austria, Denmark, Germany, Luxembourg, and Spain objected to an inclusion of nuclear power in the EU’s greenfinance category.
And nuclear energy has always overpromised and underdelivered: “Hypothetical new nuclear power technologies have been promised to be the next big thing for the last forty years, but in spite of massive public subsidies, that prospect has never panned out. That is also true of Small Modular Reactors, SMRs,” Ibid.
As explained in a press release d/d November 18, 2020, regarding SMR development: “The proposed reactors are still on the drawing board and will take a decade or more to develop. If built, their power will cost ten (10) times more than wind or solar energy. The most advanced SMR project to date in the US has already doubled its estimated costs from $3B to over $6B,” Ibid.
However, Russia has already launched a floating 70MW reactor in the Arctic Ocean (of all places!). China is also working on a floating design SMR. And three provinces in Canada are looking into SMRs. Rolls-Royce in the UK is working on a 440MW SMR. SMRs are generally designed to produce 50 to 300MW of electricity compared to the typical 1,000MW of traditional large-scale reactors.
In fairness to advocates, according to Nuscale, one of the engineering firms behind SMR development: “Even under worst case scenarios, where we lose all off-site power, the reactor will safely automatically shut down and remain cool for an unlimited time.’ adding, ‘this is the first time that’s been done’ for commercial nuclear power.” (Source: The Countries Building Miniature Nuclear Reactors, Future Planet, Yale e360, March 9, 2020).
Still, every nuclear conversation turns to radioactive waste and safety regardless of claims made by industry and with good reason. In fact, the repercussions of nuclear accident deaths and disfigurements are always buried from public view, until years later when the brutal truth finally comes out.
A BBC Future Planet article d/d July 25, 2019, The True Toll of the Chernobyl Disaster: “According to the official, internationally recognized death toll, just 31 people died as an immediate result of Chernobyl while the UN estimates that only 50 deaths can be directly attributed to the disaster. In 2005, it predicted a further 4,000 might eventually die as a result of the radiation exposure… Brown’s research, however, suggests Chernobyl has cast a far longer shadow.”
According to an article in USA Today d/d February 24, 2022, What Happened at Chernobyl? What to Know About Nuclear Disaster: “At least 28 people were killed by the disaster, but thousands more have died from cancer as a result of radiation that spread after the explosion and fire. The effects of radiation on the environment and humans is still being studied.”
As of 2023, the death count is much more than the 4,000 calculation of 2005.
The legacy of nuclear accidents, as deaths and deformities mount over time, kills the dream of a carbonless, clean power future. But legacies take years to form. Given enough time, radioactive waste will greet 30th century archeologists.
For a prize-winning compelling read about the most toxic place in America and a terrifying look at the radioactive nuclear materials produced at Hanford for four decades: Atomic Days, The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America (Haymarket Books, 2022)
Regardless of the strongest assurances, nuclear accidents happen. They just happen!
Robert Hunziker is a freelance writer and environmental journalist whose articles have been translated into foreign languages and published in over 50 journals, magazines and sites worldwide.
Image by NASA Earth Observatory is in the Public Domain
The Atmosphere is Cooling Dangerously Fast
By Robert Hunziker
The upper atmosphere is cooling too fast for comfort.
Global warming is only one half of the impact of excessive CO2 emissions generated by cars, planes, trains, and industry. The other impact is rapid cooling of the upper atmosphere which may be of considerably more concern than global warming as it negatively impacts the ozone layer, which protects the planet from burning up. Hmm, this is important.
Based upon a new study, atmospheric scientists are concerned about the impact of a rapidly cooling atmosphere: Benjamin D. Santer, et al, Exceptional Stratospheric Contribution to Human Fingerprints on Atmospheric Temperature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, PNAS Journal, May 8, 2023.
Greenhouse gases, especially CO2, impact the planet considerably more all-inclusive than realized. For example, ramifications of excessive CO2 are manifold, including what we already know as global warming but surprise, surprise, also too much atmospheric cooling which puts at dangerous risk: (1) orbiting satellites (2) the precious, all-important ozone layer and (3) tumultuous weather systems.
Excessive levels of carbon dioxide emissions (CO2) generated by humans pack a one-two-three bunch, impacting Earth’s lithosphere, atmosphere, and hydrosphere. Greenhouse gases, like CO2, function like a regulator of the planet from the heights of the Exosphere at 400-to-6,214 miles up to down to the depths of Challenge Deep in the Pacific Ocean at 36,000 feet or seven miles below surface.
The problem of excessive cooling of the atmosphere is as serious as excessive global warming and maybe more so. In both instances, disrupted ecosystems negatively alter the major life forces of the planet, creating existential risks.
The new findings about cooling in the above-mentioned Santer study are quantified in detail by satellite sensors. Thus, what climate models previously suspected about rapid atmospheric cooling is now confirmed. Moreover, scientists previously knew very little about the upper atmosphere, beyond climate modeling.
“Climate change is almost always thought about in terms of the lowest regions of the atmosphere. But physicists now warn that we need to rethink this assumption. Increases in the amount of CO2 are “manifest throughout the entire perceptible atmosphere,’ says Martin Miynezak, an atmospheric physicist at the NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. They are ‘driving dramatic changes [that] scientists are just now beginning to grasp. Those changes in the wild blue yonder far above our heads could feed back to change our world below.” (Source: Fred Pearce, The Upper Atmosphere Is Cooling, Prompting New Climate Concerns, YaleEnvironment360, May 18, 2023)
It is now known that the rate of increase in concentration of CO2 at the top of the atmosphere is as great as at the bottom. But there’s a major difference in excessive CO2 levels, meaning, the heat emitted by CO2 at the top with thinner air escapes into outer space whilst the impact of CO2 trapping more and more heat at the lower levels actually impacts rapid cooling at the top.
For example, satellite data from 2002 to 2019 show the lower thermosphere cooled by 3.1°F (1.7°C). At current rates of emissions, scientists believe cooling could hit 13.5°F (7.5C) during the century. This would be three times faster than warming at ground level. According to the Santer study, the essence of the problem: “We are fundamentally changing the thermal structure of the planet… the results make me very worried,” Ibid.
The sky is falling is a result of this rapid cooling effect, meaning cooling causes the upper air to contract. The depth of the stratosphere has diminished by 1,300 feet over the past 40 years. This has been confirmed by Petr Pišoft, atmospheric physicist at Charles University in Prague by analyzing NASA data. Additionally, the mesosphere and lower thermosphere, above the stratosphere, contracted by 4,400 feet between 2002-2019.
Contraction of the atmosphere means it is less dense which reduces drag on satellites in low orbit. In turn, this allows space junk to stick around longer and increases the risks of collisions. More than 5,000 satellites and the International Space Station are in orbit at this low altitude in competition with a lot of space junk. Cooling and contraction enhance risks of collisions.
Of much bigger concern, ozone molecules, which protect the planet from burning alive, are at risk because of excessive cooling of the upper atmosphere.
In the Arctic, upper atmospheric rapid cooling has worsened ozone loss, this according to Peter von der Gathen of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Potsdam, Germany Climate change is almost always thought about in terms of the lowest regions of the atmosphere. But physicists now warn that we need to rethink this assumption. Increases in the amount of CO2 are now “manifest throughout the entire perceptible atmosphere,” says Martin Mlyncsak, an atmospheric physicist at the NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. They are “driving dramatic changes [that] scientists are just now beginning to grasp.” Those changes in the wild blue yonder far above our heads could feed back to change our world below.” (Source: Peter von der Gathen, et al, Climate Change Favours Large Seasonal Loss of Arctic Ozone, Nature Communications, June 23, 2021)
Loss of ozone is a deadly danger signal. According to von der Gathen, current expectations that the ozone layer should be fully healed by mid-century are almost certainly overly optimistic. Moreover, the most vulnerable ozone regions are calculated to be densely populated areas including Central and Western Europe. “It we thought the thinning ozone layer was a 20th century worry, we may have to think again,” Ibid.
Upper atmospheric excessive cooling also impacts weather patterns at ground level. It’s responsible for sudden atmospheric warming, which brings big temperature swings, warming as much as 90°F in a few days. The excessive cooling dynamic causes blocking highs that can bring on weeks of extreme weather, intense rains (atmospheric bombs) summer droughts, or intense cold spells.
In many respects, the studies of human impact on the planet via excessive levels of greenhouse gases are at an early stage. After all, it’s only over the past few decades that scientists have really focused on human-generated emissions impact on the planet. Yet one thing is crystal clear, the more scientists’ study, the more they discover vulnerabilities, for example, upper atmospheric cooling puts at risk the ozone layer. As stated above, the world thought the ozone was healing. Yet, as stated: “If we thought the thinning ozone layer was a 20th century worry, we may have to think again.” (Peter von der Gathen).
It’s probably a fair suggestion that major governments of the world should collaborate by establishing an international joint effort to immediately take whatever steps are necessary to control, halt, and remove excessive greenhouse gases, assuming it is possible on such a large scale and hopefully soon enough! The integrity of the ozone layer should be all the leaders of the world need to know to limitlessly fund research and work programs, day & night, 24/7 year-round. What are the chances?
Robert Hunziker is a freelance writer and environmental journalist whose articles have been translated into foreign languages and published in over 50 journals, magazines and sites worldwide.
It’s official, according to a speech by National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, the United States is jumping off the neoliberal globalization bandwagon (a root cause of domestic extremism) and it couldn’t come soon enough as institutions of government are sucking up more and more angry exhaust fumes from constituents, as well as encountering a world trade map with China bullying its way across the world of commerce via its massive Belt and Road Initiative encircling the globe, kicking sand into Uncle Sam’s face.
Neoliberalism is an economic philosophy of capitalism that promotes freedom of markets, very little government regulation, no price controls, low trade barriers, low-low taxes, and most importantly, reducing the role of government via austerity measures and privatization of state assets. Government social programs, like food stamps, are detested like the plague. Neoliberal-minded President Ronald Reagan famously said: “Government isn’t the solution to the problem; government is the problem.”
Neoliberalism in harmony with globalization has dictated American policy for several decades, thanks to Reagan. However, that’s about to change as US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan announced changes for America’s role in the world in a very significant recent speech: “Remarks by National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan on Renewing American Economic Leadership at the Brookings Institution, The White House, April 27, 2023.”
As a backgrounder to that speech, over the past few decades America sent high-paying union jobs offshore to find the lowest common denominator wages (globalization) but it really started in earnest with Clint0n’s NAFTA deal. Back in the day Ross Perot nailed it: “You implement that NAFTA, the Mexican trade agreement, where they pay people a dollar an hour, have no health care, no retirement, no pollution controls,’ Perot said during the second presidential debate in October 1992, ‘and you’re going to hear a giant sucking sound of jobs being pulled out of this country.” (Source: Ross Perot was Ridiculed as Alarmist in 1992 but his warning turned out to be Prescient, Salon, July 21, 2019)
America’s $15-20-35/hour union jobs that spun-off into the wilderness of NAFTA originated from today’s red states. NAFTA and expansive globalization (SE Asia & China) undercut union wages, crushing a vibrant middle class that was content to work 40-hours per week for wages that supported family, school, vacations, and a good retirement. Today, former union members are red-faced, angry, frustrated, searching for a voice to avenge decades of misery at the hands of elites that crushed middle class livelihoods. Trump’s early campaign promises beckoned interest: “The three most dangerous voices in America, academic elites, political elites, and media elites” captured the heart and soul of displaced Americans by voicing one word, “Elites.”
The Biden administration knows this. His 2021 speech to a joint session of Congress countered Trump: “Trickle-down economics has never worked. It’s time to grow the economy from the bottom up and the middle out.” The table had been set for Biden’s trickle-down speech by four decades of neoliberal/globalization hanky-panky resulted in the biggest money gusher of all time but only for a select few (“the elites”). Meanwhile, the failure to adhere to the original promise of the American equality of opportunity dream is epitomized by billionaires taking joy rides into outer space.
Now, after years of abuse of the blue-collar relationship, it’s finally dawned on America’s politicos that decades of neoliberalism and globalization hollowed-out the great American industrial machine whilst breaking the spirit of working people, decimating the all-important middle core of society. It’s difficult to keep a capitalistic democracy in balance when both ends of the economic spectrum are so heavily weighted, massive golden wealth on the right shooting up into outer space versus the skimping of 42 million SNAP cards barely-getting-by in survival mode on the left, with a weakened, deeply sagging middle. This clash of classes automatically breeds frustration, anger, and hatred: “Hang Pence” easily rolled off the lips of American extremist on January 6th.
National security advisor Jake Sullivan was quick to itemize key categories of the old Washington Consensus that need to be addressed: (1) globalization and privatization have failed America; those are hallmarks of neoliberalism (2) challenges from China (3) challenges from climate change and inequality, as lowly job opportunities, the leftovers from neoliberalism-globalization’s search for the lowest common denominator, breeds contempt.
More specifically: (1) the neoliberal trajectory has left a hollowed-out industrial base (2) public investment has declined because of too much emphasis on de-regulation, privatization, and trade liberalization, which defines the post-Reagan Republican mantra (3) widespread faith in “the magic of the markets” dogma to achieving success, growth, and prosperity totally backfired with too much emphasis on the “financial sector” at the expense of a “real economy” that has solid job-producing industries such as semi-conductor manufacturing and infrastructure development, two big Biden proposals.
According to an astutely worded interpretation of Sullivan’s remarks: “The US national security establishment now argues that ‘trickle down economics’ has been a disaster that has led to ‘corporate concentration’ and ‘active measures to undermine the labor movement that initially built the American middle class.” (Source: Anuradha Chenoy, US Merges its Economics and Foreign Policy, Defend Democracy Press, May 14, 2023)
Washington Consensus-2 has not yet been thoroughly vetted or analyzed or countered by either side of the aisle, which will be difficult because it’s equivalent to rolling back time to the good ole Fifties and Sixties when unions shone, and the middle class flexed its muscles and unions impacted politics. That’s gone. Replaced by dark money billionaires pulling the strings of today’s politicians, and judges, in favor of disassembling America’s social welfare state and weakening unions as much as possible. It’s fascinating that the Federal Reserve fights inflation, in large part, based upon employment weakness or strength and rate of pay, too rapid of increases (good for labor) causes the Fed to wince and tighten credit conditions to slow down or abort high wages (bad for labor).
The White House is a strong proponent of changing America’s character to better represent its glorious past of the Fifties/Sixties strong middle-class values. After all, the country already knows via first-hand experience that farming-out good, solid American jobs to cheaper manufacturing in SE Asia and China handed over, on a golden platter, a cat’s bird seat for China in world markets whilst building its own middle class worker bees at the expense of decimation of workers in America, far removed from a distant American past of the Fifties and Sixties when real wages doubled, and blue-collar families were proud. Biden wants that once again.
Implicit within this new directive for revival of America, it’s likely that Biden and Sullivan have their fingers tightly crossed, hoping it’ll stem the outrageous infectious anger pitting Americans against Americans in an ugly throwback reminiscent of the dark shadows of Jim Crowism. It’s difficult to ignore the noose that swayed in the breeze on the capitol grounds on January 6th with its stern message and serving as an imprimatur for radical public violence. Ever since, all hell broke loose.
Robert Hunziker is a freelance writer and environmental journalist whose articles have been translated into foreign languages and published in over 50 journals, magazines and sites worldwide.
-For the first time that scientists can recall, sea surface temperatures that always recede from annual peaks are failing to do so, staying high-
Global warming and extensive overfishing have damaged ocean ecosystems well beyond recognition from only a few decades ago. Still, on its own accord, the ocean stood tall for over 3 billion years. But, alas, in less than one human lifetime it is teetering like never before, and credible studies claim the world’s oceans could be devoid of life within only three decades. This is one of the most troubling transformations of all time, nothing compares to it, absolutely nothing!
The ocean heat bomb is all about the impact of global warming and overfishing, neither of which is high enough on to-do lists of countries to help sustain ecosystems. It should be noted that Wall Street’s embrace of going green for a profit won’t come close (not enough scale soon enough) to solving the global warming problem, but there’s plenty of green to be made. By all appearances, the love affair with fossil fuels is a permanent fixture, according to IEA data, fossil fuels constitute ~80% of energy over the past 50+ years with no change as of 2023. And a reality check: “Big banks and investment firms have joined the ranks of companies making ‘net-aero’ pledges. But their huge stakes in oil and gas projects are undermining their climate promises.” (Source: How Wall Street’s Fossil-Fuel Money Pipeline Undermines the Fight to Save the Planet, Fortune, February 2, 2023)
Moreover, as if an overheated ocean is not enough of a headache, overfishing is totally out of control, nearly wiping out several species, e.g., over 11,000 sharks killed per hour at risks of extinction in part for a brew of tasteless shark fin soup.
The oceans are a gigantic heat sponge, absorbing 90% of planetary heat, enabling life to go on within its 10,000-yr Goldilocks Holocene cycle, not too hot not to cold. But times are changing very rapidly. For the first time that scientists recall, sea surface temperatures that always recede from annual peaks are failing to do so, staying high “with scientists warning that this underscores an underappreciated but grave impact of climate change.” (Source: Record Sea Surface Heat Sparks Fears of Warming Surge, Phys.org, May 4, 2023)
“Year by year ocean warming is increasing at an absolutely staggering rate,” Jean-Baptiste Sallée, Research Scientist, CNRS (French National Center for Scientific Research), Ibid.
Scientists are now warning that human-generated greenhouse gases are demonstrably exposing the worst possible scenario with the ocean turning into a global warming “heat bomb.” What goes around comes around. It appears that the ocean heat bomb has ignited.
According to US NOAA observatory recordings, in early April 2023 average surface temperatures of the oceans, excluding polar waters, hit an all-time high of 21.1°C (70°F). More than a passing interest, that all-time high might be goosed much higher by an upcoming El Niño weather phenomenon, triggering the ocean heat bomb by loading more onto the climate system. As such, the 2022 unprecedented disaster year, whacking every continent with destabilizing floods, droughts, heat, and fire may be bush-league when compared to what’s in store for 2023-24.
For perspective, it’s important to recall that 2022 was influenced by La Niña, a natural cooling cycle, yet near-record heat consumed the planet. La Niña didn’t help, which can only register as a telling disappointment. According to NASA, if the cooling impact of La Niña.is factored into the equation, 2022 was the warmest year on record.
The most immediate consequence of too much ocean heat will be more severe marine heatwaves which are comparable to terrestrial wildfires of rainforests. These underwater fire-equivalents degrade/destroy underwater kelp forests, e.g., West Coast Pacific kelp losses, and Great Barrier Reef coral bleaching, while also negatively altering key life-giving nutrients and oxygen needed for all sea life. Poof, the basic ingredients of a major ecosystem gone! This comes as the world’s oceans are already reeling from overfishing, chemical/plastic pollution, and acidification whilst overly stimulated by too much heat.
The ocean heat bomb threatens the lifeblood of civilization in a multifaceted manner and is expected to push back at some juncture by transferring heat back out. Could this spark a runaway overheated planet? Of course, it’s not only the human heat machine at work; it’s also human insatiableness, a glutinousness that ignores sustainability, destroying world fishing stock with remarkable speed and efficiency as the modern fishing fleet literally clobbers sea life.
The Overfishing Dilemma
Overfishing is a direct threat to future human consumption of sea food. According to research conducted by The World Counts (a source for ‘state of the planet’ real time data): “The world’s oceans could be virtually emptied for fish by 2048. A study shows that if nothing changes, we will run out of seafood in 2048. If we want to preserve the ecosystems of the sea, change is needed.”
The four-year study of 7,800 marine species concluded that the long-term trend is clear and predictable. It’s on a steep downward slope.
“Almost 90 percent of global marine fish stocks are now overfished, and wild capture fisheries struggle without sound regulatory frameworks and strong enforcement… Globally, data on fishing and fish stocks are insufficient to support proper management. A concerted national and international effort is needed to collect, analyze, and interpret fishing data for policymaking.” (Source: Life Below Water, The World Bank, 2017)
Nevertheless, according to The World Counts: As for fish stocks, roughly 80% of world fisheries are overly exploited, depleted or in state of collapse. Worldwide, 90% of large predatory fish, e.g., sharks, tuna, marlin, and swordfish are already gone. For example, according to the International Tuna Conservation Commission, the stock of Atlantic bluefin tuna has plummeted to 13% from its 1950 level. And according to Sci/Dev.net and the UN Food & Agri Org, Pacific bluefin tuna is estimated to be 4%-t0-5% of its 1950 levels.
The ocean’s problems are known. The solutions escape authorities. Today’s world fishing fleet has enough capacity to cover four (4) Earth-like ocean systems. It’s high tech and eerily similar to strip-mining on land. According to Canadian journalist Michael Harris, we are “using the black magic of technology to make a desert of the sea.” (Source: When Too Many Boats Chase Too Few Fish, PEW Trust, October 19, 2022)
Almost totally unregulated, the oceans are open prey for massive technologically advanced fishing fleets that literally scoop up everything, tossing aside bycatch, e.g., sharks. Mostly, these are Chinese vessels that prowl the seas. The Overseas Development Institute claims China’s distant-water fishing fleet has 17,000 vessels. The United States distant-water fleet numbers 300.
“Having depleted the seas close to home, the Chinese fishing fleet has been sailing
farther afield in recent years to exploit the waters of other countries, including those in West Africa and Latin America, where enforcement tends to be weaker as local governments lack the resources or inclination to police their waters. Most Chinese distant-water ships are so large that they scoop up as many fish in one week as local boats from Senegal or Mexico might catch in a year.” (Source: How China’s Expanding Fishing Fleet is Depleting the World’s Oceans, YaleEnvironment360, August 17, 2020)
According to the IUU (Illegal, Unreported, Unregulated) Fishing Index, China is ranked as the world’s worst abuser of sea laws, especially shark finning. China’s gigantic refrigerated vessels referred to as “Motherships” upload the catch of the Chinese fleet, thus allowing an entire fleet of trawlers to fish 24/7 without returning to port for weeks on end.
The ocean heat bomb fuse has been ignited. The question is whether it can be extinguished before it’s too late. The most likely answer is: No, it cannot be extinguished, not because it is impossible but rather because there is no coordinated worldwide plan to do so. After all, it’s underwater where nobody sees, and statistics about the status of ocean fishing stock are suspect and subject to considerable conjecture and easily criticized.
Where is a credible world coordinated plan to sustain ocean ecosystems? Where is a credible world coordinated Marshall Plan-type of concerted effort to combat global warming with the funding in place and the wherewithal to make a difference? These do not exist in the face of abundant factual evidence of a planet that’s screaming “help me!”
However, there simply is not enough focus or enough scale committed to control or ameliorate the deleterious impact of human-caused global warming that’s changing the climate 10xs faster than seen in any paleoclimate study of Earth’s history going back a billion years. Furthermore, cleaning up the mess is an overwhelming task from the get-go.
Meanwhile, greenhouse gases set new records by the year, every year without fail. “The observations collected by NOAA scientists in 2022 show that greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise at an alarming pace and will persist in the atmosphere for thousands of years, said Rick Spinrad, Ph.D., NOAA administrator.” (Source: Greenhouse Gases Continued to Increase Rapidly in 2022, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, April 5, 2023)
Year-over-year, there’s more and more degradation, more and more greenhouse gases, more and more lip service to “hold the line at 1.5°C” by toothless global conferences, and more and more distortions of the truth, which is at epidemic levels. Distorting the truth has been, and still is, one of the biggest impediments to addressing the global warming issue.
In the recent past, telltale evidence of a profound change in how society approaches existential issues reared its ugly head four days following Donald Trump’s inauguration, which boldly and falsely claimed “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration.” Immediately thereafter sales of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (published in 1949) rocketed by 10,000%, making it a No. 1 bestseller overnight. People sensed a putrid rot lingering in the air, burning nostrils.
Nineteen Eighty-Four remains the go-to source for people when “truth is mutilated… language distorted… power is abused… and when we want to know how bad things can get.” (Source: Nothing but the Truth: The Legacy of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Guardian, May 19, 2019)
Just think how unfortunately coincidental it is that (1) Orwell (2) global warming (3) overfishing and (4) Trump, the avatar of disinformation, should intersect at the same moment in history. The upshot is people question the credibility of facts and refuse to accept the truth when it matters most, thus crippling a public understanding of crucial scientific studies that should educate, not distract.
As a result, the world community doesn’t seem to know which way to turn next. It’s directionless and possibly paralyzed by the overwhelming scope of a very sticky climate problem that’s starting to haunt existence. Additionally, most people don’t live where climate change shows up first and thus find it difficult to accept the reality of the danger. For example, who lives on the Siberian permafrost or Antarctica or Greenland. Until only recently, daily life has not been impacted by the hidden reality of a fierce and rapid changing climate system afar from urban life which has only recently started encroaching upon on all continents, in 2022. Then, for the first time, the public finally saw and/or felt the impact of global warming’s influence, as trucks delivered drinking water to more than 100 parched towns and villages in the world’s most developed countries France and Italy and commercial barges sputtered in mud on commercial waterways of the Rhine, the Danube, the Po, whilst flash floods in China leveled 9,000 homes (payback for concrete supplanting wetlands) and trapped subway riders with water up to their chins. These eye-popping events happened in 2022. None of it is normal.
Meanwhile, according to a recent interview of Noam Chomsky in Boston Review: The Proto-fascist Guide to Destroying the World, “A brutal class war has devastated much of the world and led to tremendous anger, resentment, contempt for institutions… The United States is leading the way to a kind of proto-fascism.”
A primary target of proto-fascism is intelligentsia’s handwringing over climate change.
“In recent years, right-wing populists have positioned themselves as Europe’s staunchest defenders—against immigration and threats to national sovereignty; against pandemic restrictions and the influence of global institutions; and against what they regard as national governments’ hysteria over climate change, which populists have described as ‘degenerate fearmongering ‘at best and ‘totalitarian’ at worst.” (Source: The Far-Right View on Climate Politics, The Atlantic, August 10, 2021)
The populist right, or in Chomsky’s words proto-fascists, claim green policies such as fuel taxes and decarbonization incentives represent an elitist attack on the lives of regular people, thus telegraphing the issue beyond its root cause of human-generated greenhouse gases like CO2, which is becoming too obvious for outright dismissal. In similar fashion, they’ll brush off the overfishing issue, assuming it ever rings a bell with mainstream America, which is doubtful.
How is it possible to assemble a worldwide collective effort to tackle the thorny issues of climate change when disinformation muddies the waters beyond recognition?
And when is it too late to do anything?
And, at its root cause, what’s fundamentally wrong with a socio-economic system that causes, and choses to ignore, ecosystem imbalances leading to collapse?
A major scholarly study of the cause/effect of dangerous ecosystem imbalances concludes: “The evidence is clear. Long-term and concurrent human and planetary wellbeing will not be achieved in the Anthropocene if affluent overconsumption continues, spurred by economic systems that exploit nature and humans. We find that, to a large extent, the affluent lifestyles of the world’s rich determine and drive global environmental and social impact. Moreover, international trade mechanisms allow the rich world to displace its impact to the global poor. Not only can a sufficient decoupling of environmental and detrimental social impacts from economic growth not be achieved by technological innovation alone, but also the profit-driven mechanism of prevailing economic systems prevents the necessary reduction of impacts and resource utilization per se. (Source: Thomas Wiedmann, et al, Scientists’ Warning on Affluence, Nature Communications, June 19, 2020)
In other words, neoliberal capitalism’s premise that a profit-driven free market best serves society needs a major overhaul, maybe go in reverse. Evidence of its failure to
account for and respect and husband a livable planet is found throughout the world with out-of-the-ordinary heat, floods, fires, and drought on every continent, all of it beyond anything normal, beyond anything resembling a normal occurrence in nature. Ipso facto, Milton Friedman’s richly decorated legacy (Neo-Liberalism and its Prospects, 1951 and The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, 1970) enacted by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher is a bust!
Neoliberalism’s not working for the planet!
There’s gotta be a better way.
Robert Hunziker is a freelance writer and environmental journalist whose articles have been translated into foreign languages and published in over 50 journals, magazines and sites worldwide.
Nuclear war is unthinkable, but also uncontrollable once a spark is lit. There’s no turning back once that big misstep occurs. Indeed, the film Dr. Strangelove (Director Stanley Kubrick, 1964 Columbia Pictures) is all about what could happen if the wrong person pushes the wrong buttons, as US Air Force General Jack Ripper (George C. Scott) sends his bomber wing to destroy Russia to prevent a commie plot to pollute Americans.
According to a recent article: Is Nuclear War More Likely After Russia’s Suspension of the New START Treaty? Nature, March 7, 2023: “The world has lurched a step closer to the prospect of nuclear war, say researchers, after Russia declared last month that it would suspend its participation in its last major nuclear arms treaty with the United States.”
Additionally, on March 25th, 2023, Reuters: Putin Says Moscow to Place Nuclear Weapons in Belarus.
Also, January 2023- BBC News- India and Pakistan Came Close to Nuclear War: Pompeo.
All of which begs the question of what is the impact of thermonuclear explosions in war and what is the likelihood in today’s disoriented world? The ramifications of exploding thermonuclear warheads are described in some detail herein, as if a reality.
“In 2023 we find ourselves facing a risk of nuclear conflict greater than we’ve seen since the early eighties. Yet there is little in the way of public knowledge or debate of the unimaginably dire long-term consequences of nuclear war for the planet and global populations,” (Source: Public Awareness of ‘Nuclear Winter’ Too Low Given Current Risks Argues Expert, University of Cambridge, Feb.14, 2023)
Nobody expects a nuclear war to really happen. It simply cannot happen. Right?
Well, not so fast, atomic bombs were dropped on masses of people, e.g., Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, both direct hits, tens of thousands of dead. And thus, are today’s leaders, who are armed with nuclear arsenals, any less impetuous than leaders of 75 years ago? Maybe but maybe not.
“On dozens of occasions because of human error or technical miscue or active threat, the world has come dangerously close to the brink of nuclear conflagration… it is a terrifying history of which most people remain ignorant.” (Julian Cribb, How to Fix a Broken Planet, Cambridge University Press, 2023.)
“There is an urgent need for public education within all nuclear-armed states that is informed by the latest research. We need to collectively reduce the temptation that leaders of nuclear-armed states might have to threaten or even use such weapons in support of military operations… if we assume Russia’s nuclear arsenal has a comparable destructive force to that of the US – just under 780 megatons – then the least devastating scenario from the survey, in which nuclear winter claims 225 million lives, could involve just 0.1% of this joint arsenal.”(Cambridge)
Because of the real threat, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set the Doomsday Clock to its most threatening level ever at only 90-seconds to midnight largely because of multiple risks of a nuclear event out of the Ukrainian/Russian war zone. Along those lines, The Bulletin published an article explaining the impact of nuclear explosions, entitled: Nowhere to Hide, How a Nuclear War Would Kill You – and Almost Everyone Else.
A synopsis of that telling article follows herein:
Within microseconds of a nuclear blast, X-ray energy is released as a superheated fireball with temperature and pressure, like the Sun, so extreme that all matter is rendered into a hot plasma of nuclei and subatomic particles. As for example, today’s US nuclear arsenal of Minuteman III missiles with W87 thermonuclear warheads carry the destructive force of a fireball that will grow to more than 2,000 feet diameter, emitting light so intense that it’ll ignite fires at great distances. The thermal flash will cause first-degree burns at up to 8 miles from ground zero.
Thereupon, a super-powerful Blast Wave hits, traveling faster than the speed of sound with enormous destructive capability, destroying/flattening houses, and gutting skyscrapers causing massive numbers of fatalities, all in less than 10 seconds. The Blast Wave gives rise to a mushroom cloud of deadly radioactive split atoms, which drop out of the mushroom cloud as wind carries it across the landscape, exposing post-war/post-blast survivors to lethal and/or near-lethal doses of ionizing radiation. These lethal effects last days-to-weeks.
Today’s nuclear warheads are 10-times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped in Japan in the 1940s. As such, a direct hit on NYC would kill 1,000,000 people within 24 hours along with more than 2,000,000 serious injuries.
A regional war, for example, between India and Pakistan, involving 100 1.5-kiloton nuclear devices launched at high population sites would kill 27,000,000 people quickly. By way of contrast, and beyond regional war, an all-out nuclear war between, say Russia and the US, with over 4,000 100-kiloton nuclear warheads, at a minimum, would kill 360,000,000 quickly. Two years thereafter the nuclear war famine would likely be 10 times as deadly a force as the original bomb blasts.
Incomprehensively, according to The Bulletin, some military/policy circles, as of today, believe that a limited nuclear war can be successfully fought and won. But that line of reasoning presupposes a limited nuclear war that does not morph into an all-out thermonuclear battle possibly engineered by a revengeful/maddened leader, like General Ripper of Dr. Strangelove. If the abominable fantasy of a crazed general/leader of a regional contest were to morph into an all-out exchange, it would likely bring in its wake the death of more than one-half of the human population on the planet.
Accordingly, the post-blast nuclear winter scenario would bring a quick drop in land temperatures with massive widespread agricultural collapse. New research into the advent of a nuclear winter scenario demonstrates much more severe longer-lasting damage than earlier studies.
A regional nuclear war, for example between India and Pakistan crazily bombing one another, would lead to widespread firestorms so powerful in cities and industrial areas that it would cause severe global climatic change, disrupting all forms of life for decades. For example, with India and Pakistan each launching 100 warheads it would emit a stratospheric injection of five million tons of soot or pulverized superheated dust, heating the stratosphere, and forcing serious ozone depletion, whilst cooling land surface under the cloud of soot.
Once the injections of soot hit the atmosphere, they’ll stay for months-to-years, blocking sunlight and rapidly decreasing land temperatures. In turn, stratospheric temperatures increase by up to 30°C within four years, thereby causing more loss of ozone and removing its protective shield against excessive ultraviolet radiation thus burning-up vegetation as well as humans, in fact, most life on Earth, as loss of the all-important ozone layer leads to a tropical UV index above 35 within three years, which will last for four years. According to the US EPA, a UV index of 11 is categorized as “extreme danger,” severely damaging humans as well as inhibiting photolysis reaction needed for leaf expansion and plant growth.
Moreover, a large-scale nuclear winter, e.g., a US-Russia war, would cause below freezing temperatures throughout most of the Northern Hemisphere, even during summer. Under the circumstances, global temps will drop by 8°C, bringing the onset of a mini-ice age. Meanwhile, global ocean temperatures would drop by 3.5°-to-6.0°C. depending on the scale of warfare, resulting in a marine food web deficiency as total available seafood production suffers a 20-40% drop, at a minimum, and stays at reduced levels for at least four years.
According to a recent meeting of the UN Security Council d/d March 31, 2023, the risk of nuclear weapons use is higher than at any time since the Cold War.
“Risks of a direct military confrontation between the two nuclear powers, Russia and the United States, are steadily growing, the TASS news agency quoted a senior Russian diplomat as saying on Tuesday.” (Reuters, April 25, 2023)
Robert Hunziker is a freelance writer and environmental journalist whose articles have been translated into foreign languages and published in over 50 journals, magazines and sites worldwide.
Can the world handle a climate that exceeds the far-reaching excesses of 2022 when the entire world turned upside down with unprecedented flooding, fires, and drought?
NOAA and climate researchers in Germany and China believe an El Niño, starting in 2023-24, is in the works. El Niños equate to more heat throughout the planet.
Buckle-up! El Niño could increase ocean temps by 2°-to-4° Fahrenheit, impacting the planet’s entire climate system, and it’s coming on top of the whackiest, hottest, boldest climate year (2022) in recorded history as paradoxically La Niña in 2022, which is supposed to help cool the planet, didn’t help!
In 2022, the planet set heat records, drying up major commercial waterways (Po, Danube, Rhine), extreme severe drought necessitated water delivery by trucks (France, Italy, Chile), fires burned down entire towns (California), as record heat killed thousands (India). None of 2022’s record-setting fires, heat, floods, and droughts were normal. In fact, it was especially abnormal, happening in the face of a La Niña, which is part of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) climate pattern when the sea surface temperature across the eastern equatorial part of the central Pacific Ocean is typically lower (cooler) by 3° to 5 °C (5.4°to 9°F). But a cool La Niña didn’t do the job!
Now an El Niño (warmer-to-hotter) event is on tap for some time in 2023/24, likely lasting 2-5 years. The ramifications will be worldwide. According to Prof Bill McGuire, at University College London, UK: “When [El Niño arrives], the extreme weather that has rampaged across our planet in 2021 and 2022 will pale into insignificance.” (Source: El Niño Is Coming—and the World Isn’t Prepared. Wired, Dec. 24, 2022)
El Niño could very easily provide a preview of life at 1.5C, which is widely considered a line-in-the-sand not to be crossed before triggering tipping points that’ll far exceed the challenges of a record-setting hot year in 2022. The last El Niño in 2016 was the hottest year ever recorded, but not surprisingly, the oceans ever since then have accumulated much more heat over these past 6 years, now with enough to make 2016 look tame. This next El Niño could be a gut-punch, and the world is not prepared, not even close.
NOAA believes the odds favor El Niño starting this year. Researchers in Germany and China have suggested it could be “a strong one.” As a result, climate scientists are worried about a more-powerful-than-ever strain on sensitive ecosystems like the Great Barrier Reef and the Amazon rainforest, especially as they are already in a fragile state.
The risks are big: “It’s very likely that the next big El Niño could take us over 1.5C,” according to Prof Adam Scaife, the head of long-range prediction at the UK Met Office. “The probability of having the first year at 1.5C in the next five-year period is now about 50:50… We know that under climate change, the impacts of El Niño events are going to get stronger, and you have to add that to the effects of climate change itself, which is growing all the time. You put those two things together, and we are likely to see unprecedented heatwaves during the next El Niño.” (Source: Warming of Unprecedented Heatwaves as El Niño Set to Return in 2023, The Guardian, March 2021).
A strong El Niño, similar to 2015/16, could bring on permanent damage to ecosystems. Back in 2015-16, the Great Barrier Reef experienced its most devastating coral bleaching ever as marine heat killed more than one-half of the corals in the northern portion of the reef. Moreover, even in the La Niña (cooling) year of 2022 it was still hot enough to cause massive bleaching.
Meanwhile, the Amazon rainforest is very near a critical tipping point of no return as it struggles with global warming and deforestation. The last El Niño killed 2,500,000,000 trees, which temporarily turned one of the world’s largest carbon-capturing ecosystems into a source of carbon emissions. Such an unfolding tragedy requires no preamble to understand the enormity of risks when tampering with the planet’s most significant hydrosphere, releasing billions of tons of moisture into the atmosphere with key worldwide impact.
That same 2015-16 El Niño brought severe drought to Indonesia with massive wildfires in forests, emitting vast stores of carbon into the atmosphere. And the same El Niño was behind a massive bout of melting in Antarctica in January 2016 as a sheet of meltwater formed across the Ross Ice Shelf, the largest ice shelf of Antarctica.
Yet, it cannot be emphasized enough that 2015-16 was merely a warning of what was to come with increasing levels of greenhouse gases like CO2 and Ch4 and N2O. As of February 2023, according to the US EPA: “Global carbon emissions from fossil fuels have significantly increased since 1900. Since 1970, CO2 emissions have increased by about 90%, with emissions from fossil fuel combustion and industrial processes contributing about 78% of the total greenhouse gas emissions increase from 1970 to 2011. Agriculture, deforestation, and other land-use changes have been the second largest contributors.”
And according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: “Greenhouse gases continued to increase rapidly in 2022… Carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide rise further into uncharted levels… 2022 was the 11th consecutive year CO2 increased by more than 2 ppm, the highest sustained rate of CO2 increases in the 65 years since monitoring began. Prior to 2013, three consecutive years of CO2 growth of 2 ppm or more had never been recorded.” (Source: US EPA, April 5, 2023)
Clearly, greenhouse gases are out of control more so than at any other time in human history in the face of a climate system that’s unmistakably burping, coughing, wheezing, burning, and dying. The great iconic masterpieces of nature like the Amazon rainforest and the Great Barrier Reef are sickly and turning against nature. This is not normal.
All of which leads to a distinct possibility of an upcoming extreme topsy-turvy climate scenario in the face of a very weak, in fact feeble-minded, discordant world leadership, which is a toxic combination that is certain to be fatal, as dire circumstances require unity of purpose, not discord.
Meanwhile, as the oceans absorb increasing levels of planetary heat, there’s evidence that El Niños are starting to affect El Niños leading to Super El Niños. “Over the last 40 years or so, the world has seen some of the strongest El Niños on record.” (Source: A Looming El Niño Could Give Us a Preview of Life at 1.5C on Warming, Grist, Feb. 24, 2023).
As greenhouse gases like CO2 emitted by cars, trains, planes, and industry increase by the year, Super El Niños will start to affect Super El Niños, bringing in its wake Super-Super El Niños with devastating consequences never considered possible. Then what?
There is only one logical solution to hopefully counter this fierce impending risk. The world must convert to renewables and initiate carbon removal techniques as quickly as possible, but what are the prospects remains an open question? What on earth can discordant leadership accomplish?
Robert Hunziker is a freelance writer and environmental journalist whose articles have been translated into foreign languages and published in over 50 journals, magazines and sites worldwide.
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