Climate change

There are expressions that one encounters when one is very young, which mean little more than the words themselves. They lack the emotional resonance that they slowly accrete as one gets older. I am sure my father and my grandfather, ur-pendants and lovers of the English language, familiarized me to the expression "Nero fiddled while Rome burned". But what did that expression mean to me when I was young? Perhaps it evoked an image of fat, elderly men in togas playing violins as angry flames leapt towards the sky in the background. But did it mean anything more than that image? I lacked the experience to understand the monumental scale of human capacity for denial, for not facing facts, for looking away from ugly reality as it stands right in front of them. I had not gone through medical school, not encountered patients whose entire arms were consumed by basal cell carcinomas – tumors that are so slow growing that it must have taken 20 years to get to that size. Why did the patient not have it looked at when it was a millimeter or so across, when it could have been safely and painlessly removed? Why did he wait until he had to have his entire arm amputated? Or that woman patient, from a family well known to our hospital for their generosity and philanthropy, whose breast cancer had ulcerated through her skin, giving rise to an oozing, bloody mess – why had she not reported earlier to the very breast cancer center that her family had donated so much to establish? I did not realize then that the expression about Nero and fiddling and Rome was merely a cautionary tale about the human ability to look away from catastrophe and distract ourselves with frivolity.

These days I am daily reminded of the much-maligned Emperor’s musical proclivities  as we go about our daily activities, unmindful of the growing evidence that we are facing a calamity of epic proportions. There was a time, about 10-15 years ago, when I felt that the effects of climate change would take place in my grandchildren's time and while it was a matter of concern, it was not a problem of great immediacy. But the events of 2015, coupled with two recent papers alarm me and cause me to realize that the changes are taking place much more rapidly than I had thought.

2014 was the warmest year in recorded history; 2015 is already on track to surpass that. July 2015 has been the warmest month on record. Horrible, disastrous heatwaves have struck India, Pakistan, Europe, and much of the United States. Western United States is experiencing some of the worst wildfires in history and California suffering the worst draught in modern times.

Bill McGibben, the environmentalist, begins his piece in Rolling Stones with the following sentences:

"If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado haven't convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this summer, here are some hard numbers about climate change: June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere – the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe."

James Hansen, one of my heroes in science for his long record of being correct about environmental predictions and his fierce, unwavering commitment to his cause (even though many have criticized for being overly dramatic and pessimistic) has published, along with several notable colleagues, a paper in the Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions. The paper make the following truly alarming predictions:

“We conclude that continued high emissions will make multi-meter sea level rise practically unavoidable and likely to occur this century. Social disruption and economic consequences of such large sea level rise could be devastating. It is not difficult to imagine that conflicts arising from forced migrations and economic collapse might make the planet ungovernable, threatening the fabric of civilization.”

Just this morning, NASA released its assessment of sea level rise due to climate change and believes that a 3-foot rise in ocean levels is already locked in in our future, even if we reduce global CO2 emissions to zero right now (an eventuality that is completely unlikely to happen!). While they are unable to predict when this 3 foot rise may take place, their scenario is apocalyptic:

"New satellite research from NASA shows that not only are global sea levels rising quickly, but they could rise even more drastically than previous reports estimated. According to the US space agency, seas around the world have risen an average of three inches (7.6 cm) since 1992, and as much as nine inches (23 cm) in certain places."

Amidst all of this scary news, New England is behaving like a truly blessed oasis. We are experiencing a balmy summer. Historical records show that we usually have thirteen 90°F plus days in each summer. Thus far, we have had 7! As we approach September, temperatures will begin their slow, inexorable slide towards the brutal cold of winter. It seems unlikely that we will have even as many warm days this year as we usually do. Far from hitting new records for heat, we are experiencing a magical summer, warm but not humid or unpleasant. This is cool summer, following one of the colder winters in my recollection, will probably make the New England's 2015 cooler than the normal, unlike the rest of the world.

My own vision of the future gets progressively more bleak with each passing day. I fear that great parts of the world are going to become uninhabitable in our own lifetime. If the drought persists long enough and the temperatures keep going up, can people survive in Australia? What about great swatches of the Middle East, wherein temperatures are increasingly creeping up to the 120, 130°F levels? Will central and northern India be habitable in another 20 years? The migrations that we are reading about from Northern Africa into Europe are harbingers of things to come, I fear. I envision the kind of mass migrations that took place 80,000 years ago, when our species moved out of Africa due to increasing global temperatures. The globe was almost empty of people then and there was plenty of room for the migrants.  Where will 7 billion people crowd themselves? In the Maritime Canadian provinces and New England? I can see the kind of global unrest that Hansen and his colleagues are predicting.

Despite the inevitable changes that seem to be in our immediate future, we go about our merry ways without a care in the world. Perhaps we should all start ordering our togas.