For a long time, global warming was seen as an issue of tomorrow, something our helpless grandchildren would must worry about. But as heat records proceed to fall, it's clear that the longer term is actually already here. We are the helpless grandchildren. And it's also clear that we will not be prepared for the warmth.
Monday was the most well liked day since weather records began. The average global temperature reached 17.15 degrees Celsius, in line with the EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service, beating the previous record set on Sunday.
Before Sunday, the previous record was set in July 2023. In fact, the last 10 years were the ten highest annual maximum temperatures on record, as Copernicus data dating back to 1940 shows. The last two years' highs have kicked right into a recent gear, exceeding 17 degrees for the primary time. Last yr, we could attribute a few of that heat to the El Niño weather phenomenon, which tends to boost global temperatures. But El Niño is over, and the mercury remains to be alarmingly high.
These are also likely the best levels in around 125,000 years. Climate change deniers never tire of declaring that the climate has all the time been changing. The hot period 5,000 generations ago – when temperatures were a maximum of 1.5 degrees above the pre-industrial average, roughly such as the last sweltering yr – was followed by a protracted ice age. After that, the planet naturally warmed to the comfortable temperatures by which human civilization thrived for around 240 generations – a golden age of agriculture, air-con and Stanley Cups.
Turbocharged weather
The bad news is that those comfortable temperatures are a thing of the past because that very same civilization is burning fossil fuels and pumping heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere. We're on target to exceed 1.5°C and move closer to three°C, accelerating a process that will normally take hundreds of years. These will be the hottest years in recorded history, but they will even be amongst the good we'll ever see again.
Higher temperatures are cranking up the planet's weather machines, resulting in more frequent and severe heat waves, droughts, wildfires and floods, and increasingly destructive hurricanes and thunderstorms. As they rise, they are going to ultimately melt ice sheets and lift global sea levels, wipe out the Amazon rainforest, thaw boreal permafrost and release methane gas and ancient pathogens, kill coral reefs and shut off the currents within the Atlantic that control Europe's thermostat. They will result in mass migration and resource wars.
But the deadliest immediate impact is just the warmth itself. It attacks human health at every level and already claims more lives every year than all other natural disasters combined. The problem is so large and so insidious that we don’t yet fully understand its extent.
The greater than 2,300 heat-related deaths within the United States last yr were just those by which heat played an obvious role. A 2020 study by researchers at Brown University, Boston University and the University of Toronto suggests the true number could also be greater than twice that. The variety of uncounted heat deaths worldwide could approach half 1,000,000 annually.
Protection for vulnerable people
Quantifying the health threat posed by heat is crucial, but it surely's only the start. People also should be higher educated concerning the dangers so that they stop putting themselves in harm's way. That includes changing cultural attitudes toward heat as “something to be readily embraced, bravely endured, blithely ignored, or, in the case of some marginalized communities, quite rightly earned,” Umair Irfan and Aja Romano of Vox recently wrote.
On your last point, the people most exposed to the warmth are the elderly, young children, individuals with underlying medical conditions, and folks without air-con. Neighborhoods that were formerly redlined have fewer trees and suffer probably the most from the urban heat island effect. All deserve higher protection than they now receive.
And even OSHA's proposal announced last month, which drew fierce political backlash from Republicans, will leave 7.9 million public employees unprotected, Politico's E&E News reported Wednesday. That's since the law creating OSHA merely gave it authority over private firms. Public employees must depend on states for cover, and 23 of them haven’t bothered. Combined with the Federal Emergency Management Agency's bizarre reluctance to contemplate heat waves as natural disasters, these are failures Congress must fix.
If the Earth's atmosphere suddenly contained a colorless, odorless gas that never went away and killed and sickened tens of millions of individuals yearly, we might consider this a health emergency on the size of a pandemic and possibly dedicate the whole society to fighting the colorless, odorless gas. We should treat the brand new everlasting state of worldwide heat with no less urgency.
Mark Gongloff is a Bloomberg Opinion editor. ©2024 Bloomberg. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.
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