World On Fire: What The Past Five Years Foreshadow For The Forseeable Future

[hatrack]

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The second force is also contained in the story of the wildfires: the way that climate change is finally striking close to home. Some quite special homes. The California fires of 2017 burned the state’s wine crop, blowtorched million-dollar vacation properties, and threatened both the Getty Museum and Rupert Murdoch’s Bel-Air estate. There may not be two better symbols of the imperiousness of American money than those two structures. Nearby Disneyland was quickly canopied by an eerily apocalyptic orange sky. On local golf courses, the west coast’s wealthy swung their clubs just yards from blazing fires in photographs that could not have been more perfectly staged to skewer the country’s indifferent plutocracy. Last year, Americans watched the Kardashians evacuate via Instagram stories, then read about the private firefighting forces they employed, the rest of the state reliant on a public force full of conscripted convicts earning as little as a dollar a day.

By accidents of geography and by the force of its wealth, the US has, to this point, been mostly protected from the devastation climate change has already visited on parts of the less developed world. The fact that warming is now hitting its wealthiest citizens is not just an opportunity for ugly bursts of liberal schadenfreude; it is also a sign of just how hard, and how indiscriminately, it is hitting. All of a sudden, it’s getting a lot harder to protect against what’s coming.

What is coming? Much more fire, much more often, burning much more land. American wildfires now burn twice as much land as they did as recently as 1970. By 2050, destruction from wildfires is expected to double again. For every additional degree of global warming, it could quadruple. At three degrees of warming, our likely benchmark for the end of the century, the US might be dealing with 16 times as much devastation from fire as we are today, when in a single year 10m acres were burned. The California fire captain believes the term is already outdated: “We don’t even call it fire season any more,” he said in 2017. “Take the ‘season’ out – it’s year-round.”

But wildfires are not an American affliction; they are a global pandemic. Each year, between 260,000 and 600,000 people worldwide die from the smoke they produce. In icy Greenland, fires in 2017 appeared to burn 10 times more area than in 2014; and in Sweden, in 2018, forests in the Arctic Circle went up in flames. Fires that far north may seem innocuous, relatively speaking, since there are not so many people there. But they are increasing more rapidly than fires in lower latitudes, and they concern climate scientists greatly: the soot and ash they give off can blacken ice sheets, which then absorb more of the sun’s rays and melt more quickly. Another Arctic fire broke out on the Russia-Finland border in 2018, and smoke from Siberian fires that summer reached all the way to the mainland US. That same month, the 21st century’s second-deadliest wildfire swept through the Greek seaside, killing 100. At one resort, dozens of guests tried to escape the flames by descending a narrow stone staircase into the Aegean, only to be engulfed along the way, dying literally in each other’s arms. There were record-breaking fires in the UK, as well, including one on Saddleworth Moor that was thought to be defeated – until it emerged again from the forest’s peat floor, to become the largest British wildfire in living memory.

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A firefighting helicopter tackles a blaze in a suburb of Athens last year. Photograph: Alexandros Vlachos/EPA

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/02/the-devastation-of-human-life-is-in-view-what-a-burning-world-tells-us-about-climate-change-global-warming

[CrispyQ]

1. A sobering read.

Global warming may seem like a distended morality tale playing out over several centuries and inflicting a kind of Old Testament retribution on the great-great-grandchildren of those responsible, since it was carbon burning in 18th-century England that lit the fuse of everything that has followed. But that is a fable about historical villainy that acquits those of us alive today – and unfairly. The majority of the burning has come in the last 25 years – since the premiere of Seinfeld. Since the end of the second world war, the figure is about 85%. The story of the industrial world’s kamikaze mission is the story of a single lifetime – the planet brought from seeming stability to the brink of catastrophe in the years between a baptism or barmitzvah and a funeral.

[The_jackalope]

2. Speaking as a climate nihilist

I see no reason whatsoever for optimism in David Wallace-Wells' sobering, accurate description. What I've learned about human psychology over the last decade has convinced me that instead of girding our loins for the climate battle, we will simply keep kicking the can down the road until it tumbles off the cliff, and our descendants will lie broken on the rocks below.