Climate Change Is Here, Whether We Like It Or Not – CleanTechnica

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A recent headline in the New York Times said, “Storm Lashes the Carolinas With Historic Amounts of Rain — More than a foot of rain fell on parts of North Carolina over 12 hours, catching residents, officials and forecasters by surprise.” It caught people by surprise? How is that possible? The oil companies have known since the 1950s that climate change would be the result of using their products. Their own scientists gave them all the information they needed to know their business model was a threat to the environment, but they just plowed ahead, boring holes in the ground, building refineries, and creating distribution networks because profits were more important than survival.

Scientists have told us for at least 50 years the facts of life. Warmer air holds more moisture. More moisture means heavier rains. Warmer oceans pump more moisture into an already warmer atmosphere. And all the time, we silly humans continue burning fossil fuels, which make the atmosphere and the oceans warmer still and ramps up the whole process another notch. Those residents, officials, and forecasters shouldn’t have been surprised by historically heavy rains. They should be surprised it doesn’t happen more often.

What they are really surprised about is that there were no screaming headlines, no breathless TV reporters showing shopkeepers boarding up windows, no umbrellas flying down Main Street, no graphics on the 6 o’clock news showing how the storm formed in the South Atlantic, tracked across the ocean picking up strength and what its projected path would be. In other words, the storm was unexpected, and yet logically, there is no reason why it should not have been. The new normal is to expect the unexpected. Things are about to get a lot worse as all the warnings we have been given by climate scientists for half a century come true.

“More than 18 inches of rain fell in Carolina Beach, North Carolina between midnight Sunday and Monday afternoon,” the New York Times reports. “Forecasters in Wilmington called the likelihood of that amount of rain occurring in only 12 hours a one-in-a-thousand-year event.” That is simply wrong. There is no reason to believe the a similar storm could not happen tomorrow or next week. The mayor of Carolina Beach said this was the third major flooding event in Carolina Beach in the past few months that the town did not anticipate. Well, duh. Maybe it is time to start anticipating such things? We have altered our climate so dramatically by polluting the atmosphere with trillions of tons of carbon dioxide and methane that such storms should no longer be unexpected.

Climate Change Should Be A Surprise To No One

Readers of a certain age will recall that in the last few decades of the 20th century, apologists for Big Oil pooh-poohed climate change. Carbon dioxide was part of the normal cycle of life. Plants need it to grow, and that is correct. But while our tomatoes do need a small amount of fertilizer to grow, if you back up a 12-ton truck of fertilizer and dump it all onto your garden, all your vegetables will die. There is such a thing as too much of a good thing. Those tomatoes need watering, but they don’t need to be inundated by the entire contents of Lake Mead. All the jabbering by fossil fuel apologists lacked any sense of proportion.

The fossil fuel crowd tells us we can never have too much, because it would be bad for business to say that. But what they don’t tell us is that it took millions of years to create coal, oil, and methane. In less than 200 years, we have unleashed what took millennia to create and that has destabilized the environment to the point where our expectations are no longer operative. We have moved into an era where 12 inches of rain in 12 hours is the new normal.

In Europe last week, Storm Boris brought extreme rain and catastrophic flooding to Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, the Alpine regions of southern Germany and Austria, and into Hungary. The rain cause flooding that “resulted in significant loss of life,” according to The Guardian. Vermont in recent years has been impacted by flooding unlike anything that state has seen before in history. Those floods are what led Bill McKibben to write Oil And Honey, his book that draws a bright line connecting the activities of fossil fuel companies and the floods. Anyone who has read it should have no reason to be surprised when similar flooding comes to their little corner of the world.

Climate Engineering Is A Non-Starter

A separate story in the Washington Post reports on efforts underway in some places around the world to engineer our way out of the climate crisis by finding ways to reduce the power of hurricanes and typhoons. According to Axios, in 2019, Donald Trump proposed exploding nuclear bombs inside those storms to weaken them, something only a very stable genius would suggest. A somewhat less extreme idea is being suggested by Olav Hollingsaeter, the CEO of OceanTherm, a Norwegian company that wants to install pipes in the Atlantic to pump cooler water from deep below to cool the surface of the ocean along the pathways where hurricanes tend to form. Scientists in Japan are working on that country’s Moonshot Research and Development Program, which is exploring the possibility of controlling and modifying the weather.

Moshe Alamaro is a retired research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who took part in a 2008 workshop convened by the Department of Homeland Security to research the possibility of hurricane modification. But he has since changed his mind on the idea. Even if such a plan could work, he wonders what would happen if an altered storm spared one community but went on to kill people somewhere else? What if a modified typhoon blew past Japan only to hit North Korea? “You would get World War III,” he said. “I was foolish enough to think it would work. I came to the conclusion that it’s hopeless. The only remedy is not to build near shore and improve construction standards.”

The Takeaway

We live in fraught times. The days when the Nile overflowed its banks every spring, bringing life-giving nutrients to the surrounding fields, are long past. The relatively stable time on the Earth following the end of the last Ice Age is transitioning into the next new normal, and it may be an era that is far less friendly to human life. If we wish to preserve the Golden Age we live in — or rather used to live in — we don’t need pipes in the ocean or small tactical nuclear bombs to disrupt storm systems. We don’t need massive geoengineering projects that will disrupt the environment in ways no one can predict.

What we need to end climate change is to end the use of fossil fuels. We need to electrify everything and derive that electricity only from renewable sources. In other words, we need to stop the flow of carbon and methane pollution into the environment by choosing to wean ourselves from our fossil fuel addiction. We can no longer allow our Earth to be sacrificed on the altar of profits. We have all the information we need. We know what must be done. It’s time to open our eyes, see what is happening around us, stop making excuses and start doing what needs to be done.

Rather than grandiose plans to combat climate change with meddlesome human schemes, let’s make the cost of using fossil fuels commensurate with the harm they do. Once the profit motive is removed, all the changes we so desperately need and fervently hope for will happen, and not a moment too soon.