How the Climate Crisis Is Killing Us, in 9 Alarming Charts

Maybe you live in Ohio, far away from rising seas. Maybe you live in Canada, nowhere near a blazing desert. You might think climate change isn’t your problem, at least not yet. But maybe today we can change your mind.

The medical journal The Lancet just released its annual report on climate change and human health. A work of over 100 experts—doctors, climatologists, economists, and more—the massive study looks at 41 indicators, including extreme weather like droughts, energy trends like fuel use, and agricultural impacts like changing growing conditions.

The collective implications are ugly: A child born today, the authors note, could live in a world that’s 4 degrees warmer than in preindustrial times. “We have no idea what that looks like from a public health perspective, but we know it is catastrophic,” said Nick Watts, executive director of Lancet Countdown: Tracking Progress on Health and Climate Change, during a press conference announcing the findings. “We know that it has the potential to undermine the last 50 years of gains in public health and overwhelm the health systems we rely on.”

Read the story from Wired by Matt Simon - “How the Climate Crisis Is Killing Us, in 9 Alarming Charts.”

Rising Seas Will Erase More Cities by 2050, New Research Shows

Rising seas could affect three times more people by 2050 than previously thought, according to new research, threatening to all but erase some of the world’s great coastal cities. 

The authors of a paper published Tuesday developed a more accurate way of calculating land elevation based on satellite readings, a standard way of estimating the effects of sea level rise over large areas, and found that the previous numbers were far too optimistic. The new research shows that some 150 million people are now living on land that will be below the high-tide line by midcentury. 

Southern Vietnam could all but disappear. 

The first map shows earlier expectations of submerged land by 2050. But the new outlook, the second map, indicates that the bottom part of the country will be underwater at high tide. 

More than 20 million people in Vietnam, almost one-quarter of the population, live on land that will be inundated. 

Read the story from The New York Times by Denise Lu and Christopher Flavelle - “Rising Seas Will Erase More Cities by 2050, New Research Shows.”

Rising sea, erosion to wreak havoc in low-lying suburbs: report

Rising seas are threatening to encroach on low-lying parts of Melbourne within 20 years, causing flooding and erosion in suburbs including St Kilda, Point Cook, Mordialloc, Seaford and Frankston.

Locals Dave Sutton (left) and Phillip Heath on the remaining
strip separating the surf beach from the road at Inverloch,
 where erosion has caused major problems.

Other places at risk include areas around Queenscliff and Barwon Heads on the Bellarine Peninsula; the south-west Victorian towns of Port Fairy and Portland; and Tooradin, Lang Lang and Seaspray in the state's south-east.

A report tabled in Victoria's Parliament last week examines the myriad threats to the state’s fragile coastline, painting an alarming picture of damage to the environment and suburban Melbourne if no action is taken.

The Victorian Environmental Assessment Council report cites a 20-centimetre sea-level rise by 2040 and between 40 centimetres and one metre by century’s end.

Read the story from The Age by Benjamin Preiss and Adam Carey - “Rising sea, erosion to wreak havoc in low-lying suburbs: report.”

Their Islands Are Being Eroded. So Are Their Human Rights, They Say

MASIG ISLAND, Australia — Every weekend, Yessie Mosby visits the sandy, washed-out graves of his ancestors to gather their scattered bones. Their shallow burial place, just yards from the shore of Masig Island, north of mainland Australia, has been eroded by rising seas.

A view of Masig Island, north of mainland Australia.
 As climate change pushes the tides ever higher, this
island and others nearby are at risk of vanishing.

“Other parents around the world go to the beach with their kids and pick up shells,” Mr. Mosby, 37, a craftsman and father of five, said as he moved fragments of his sixth great-grandmother’s bones to a spot beneath a coconut tree. “We pick up remains.”

The lives of the people here are tied to the island, one of 18 spits of earth in the Torres Strait inhabited by Indigenous Australians. It holds the histories of those who came before; it protects and nourishes. But as climate change pushes the tides ever higher, these islands, and their ancient culture, are at risk of vanishing.

Read the story from The New York Times by Livia Albeck-Ripka - “Their Islands Are Being Eroded. So Are Their Human Rights, They Say.”

Climate’s Troubling Unknown Unknowns

Donald Rumsfeld famously popularized the term “unknown unknowns” in a 2002 news briefing when describing the challenges of linking Iraq to weapons of mass destruction. Troublingly, climate change may also be strewn with such unknowns, and they pose daunting tests for how we face the future.

Dirty air blanketing the New York skyline at sunset.

One is choosing among policy alternatives. Should we minimize tomorrow’s risks now by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, or save money today and spend it on adapting to the effects of planetary warming once threats emerge more fully, like rising seas or prolonged droughts? The policy debate increasingly tilts toward adaptation.

But we can’t adapt to perils from unknown unknowns. In such cases, adaptation will largely fail; only mitigation will be effective.

Read the opinion piece from The New York Times by William B. Gail - “Climate’s Troubling Unknown Unknowns.”

The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells review – our terrifying future

You already know it’s bad. You already know the weather has gone weird, the ice caps are melting, the insects are disappearing from the Earth. You already know that your children, and your children’s children, if they are reckless or brave enough to reproduce, face a vista of rising seas, vanishing coastal cities, storms, wildfires, biblical floods. As someone who reads the news and is sensitive to the general mood of the times, you have a general sense of what we’re looking at. But do you truly understand the scale of the tribulations we face? David Wallace-Wells, author of the distressingly titled The Uninhabitable Earth, is here to tell you that you do not. “It is,” as he puts it in the book’s first line, “worse, much worse, than you think.”

Burning issue … Eagle Creek ablaze near Beacon Rock golf
course in North Bonneville, Washington, in September 2017.

The book expands on a viral article, also titled The Uninhabitable Earth, which Wallace-Wells published in New York in the summer of 2017, and which frightened the life out of everyone who read it. Writing at length, he is even more remorseless in his delineation of what the not nearly distant enough future probably holds for us. The book’s longest section, entitled Elements of Chaos, is composed of 12 short and brutal chapters, each of which foretells a specific dimension of our forecast doom, and whose titles alone – Heat Death; Dying Oceans; Unbreathable Air; Plagues of Warming – are enough to induce an honest-to-God panic attack.

Wallace-Wells identifies a tendency, even among those of us who think we are already sufficiently terrified of the future, to be strangely complacent about the figures. Yes, we know that climate change will cause sea level rises of between four to eight feet before the end of this century, but then again what’s a few feet if you happen to live a couple of miles inland? “That so many feel already acclimated to the prospect of a near-future world with dramatically higher oceans,” he writes, “should be as dispiriting and disconcerting as if we’d already come to accept the inevitability of extended nuclear war – because that is the scale of devastation the rising oceans will bring.”

Read the book review from The Guardian by Mark O’Connell - “The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells review – our terrifying future.”

Pentagon revised Obama-era report to remove risks from climate change

Internal changes to a draft Defense Department report de-emphasized the threats climate change poses to military bases and installations, muting or removing references to climate-driven changes in the Arctic and potential risks from rising seas, an unpublished draft obtained by The Washington Post reveals.

Wave-driven flooding and overwash on Roi-Namur Atoll,
 Republic of the Marshall Islands, where the U.S. military’s
 Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site is located. 

The earlier version of the document, dated December 2016, contains numerous references to “climate change” that were omitted or altered to “extreme weather” or simply “climate” in the final report, which was submitted to Congress in January 2018. While the phrase “climate change” appears 23 separate times in the draft report, the final version used it just once.

Read the story from The Washington Post - “Pentagon revised Obama-era report to remove risks from climate change.”

Seas are rising too fast to save much of the Mississippi River Delta, scientists say

The state of Louisiana is proceeding with ambitious plans to redirect the Mississippi River and rebuild some of its rapidly vanishing wetlands — but even this massive intervention may not be enough to save the most threatened lands from fast rising seas, scientists concluded in a study published Wednesday.

This amplified color mosaic shows the Mississippi Delta in 2014. 

The study uses a methodology called “optical dating” to study how the river built an area called the Lafourche subdelta in coastal Louisiana, where the Mississippi dumped loads of sediment as much as 600 years ago, when it changed paths. The technology lets scientists identify the last time that long-buried sand was exposed to sunlight and, therefore, determine the rate at which the river naturally built up land by carrying sediment downstream.

“What we found was that, on average, it produced somewhere between 6 and 8 square kilometers of land per year, and the shoreline migrated seaward by somewhere between 100 and 150 meters per year,” said Torbjorn Tornqvist, a Tulane University geologist who was one of the study’s authors. “Those numbers in themselves I find pretty impressive.”

Read Chris Mooney’s story from The Washington Post - “Seas are rising too fast to save much of the Mississippi River Delta, scientists say.”

Five Pacific islands lost to rising seas as climate change hits

Five tiny Pacific islands have disappeared due to rising seas and erosion, a discovery thought to be the first scientific confirmation of the impact of climate change on coastlines in the Pacific, according to Australian researchers.

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The submerged islands were part of the Solomon Islands, an archipelago that over the last two decades has seen annual sea levels rise as much as 10mm (0.4in), according to research published in the May issue of the online journal Environmental Research Letters.

The missing islands, ranging in size from 1 to 5 hectares (2.5-12.4 acres) were not inhabited by humans.

But six other islands had large swaths of land washed into the sea and on two of those, entire villages were destroyed and people forced to relocate, the researchers found.

Read The Guardian story - “Five Pacific islands lost to rising seas as climate change hits.”

Corporate climate risk is all about turning a profit, not fixing the problem

Climate change poses a major threat to the future of humanity. Extreme weather, rising seas, ocean acidification and biodiversity collapse will undermine many of the systems on which we depend. We’ve even seen a recent example of this, with South Australia’s storm and blackout illustrating the vulnerability of our society to extreme weather.

Risk has become a central construct for how businesses should respond to climate change. As Hank Paulson, former Secretary of the US Treasury has argued, “climate change is not only a risk to the environment but it is the single biggest risk that exists to the economy today”.

The G20 is currently investigating how companies are exposed to climate risk, and how they disclose that risk to consumers.

However, instead of dealing with the larger problem of rapid and systemic decarbonisation, most businesses construct climate risk solely through the lens of profitability and market opportunity.

Read the piece on The Conversation by the Professor of Organisational Studies at the University of Sydney, Christopher Wright, and the Professor of Management in the Newcastle Business School at the University of Newcastle, Daniel Nyberg - “Corporate climate risk is all about turning a profit, not fixing the problem.”

Saving the Amazon must be on our to-do list - Gisele Bundchen

Gisele Bundchen - she wants us to consider
the dangers of climate change.

Until now, most people thought of the Olympics as a forum for athletic records, not temperature records. But the Rio organisers wove environmental themes into the celebration of sports, showing the dangers we face if we allow climate change to worsen. The message was clear: we may live in separate countries with unique languages, flags and medal counts, but we are all bound together by the limits of our natural world.

At no point was this more evident than when the stadium floor was covered in projected images of cities such as Lagos, Shanghai, Amsterdam and Rio being submerged by rising seas. On an otherwise joyful night, watching images of Rio, the "marvellous city", sink beneath the waves was a sobering moment I will not forget. Yes, Brazil, like the whole world, stands to lose a lot in a climate-altered world. But it's also one of the major forces determining our future: It's the home of most of the Amazon rainforest.

Read the comment in today’s Melbourne Age by Gisele Bundchen - “Saving the Amazon should be on everyone's to-do list.”

Coastal councils are already adapting to rising seas

Sarah Boulter writes about
protecting our coasts.

The wild storms that lashed eastern Australia earlier this year damaged property and eroded beaches, causing millions of dollars' worth of damage. As sea levels rise, the impact of storms will threaten more and more homes, businesses and services along the coastline.

CSIRO projections suggest that seas may rise by as much 82cm by the end of the century. When added to high tides, and with the influence of winds and associated storms, this can mean inundation by waters as high as a couple of metres.

As a community, we have to start deciding what must be protected, and how and when; where we will let nature take its course; how and if we need to modify the way we live and work near the coast; and so on. Many of these decisions fall largely to local governments.

Read the piece on The Conversation by a Research Fellow from the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility at Griffith University, Sarah Boulter - “Coastal councils are already adapting to rising seas – we’ve built a website to help.”

Rate of New York City flooding jumps as climate change worsens

New York City is vulnerable to rising seas and larger, more powerful storms that result in more frequent and intense flooding and what was once a 500-year flood prior to human-induced climate change now occurs on average once every 24 years. This is according to a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Flood heights are increasing and have increased since the pre-anthropogenic era, not only because of rising sea levels but also because of the impact that climate change is having on tropical cyclones," said lead author Andra Reed of Penn State University.

Read the Inside Climate News story - “500-Year Floods Coming to New York Every 24 Years, Study Says.”