Record heat waves and floods could become the norm

The record heat wave in Russia and the deadly heat and flooding in Asia may become the norm rather than the exception according to climate scientists. Combined with glacier melting, water shortages, and rising sea levels, global warming could do more than change the environment, it could trigger global conflict. This is what the wildfire distribution looks like, image courtesy of the Resource Management System of Fire Information. They are based on the analysis of low resolution photos with thermal channels (Terra/Modis, 1 km). The sites of the fire are marked.

“The record heat waves we’re seeing this summer aren’t simply a random event in isolation. they are embedded in the warmest 6 month period the globe has seen in the instrumental record spanning the past 150 years, said Professor Michael Mann, a noted paleo-climatologist researcher. “And a wealth of paleoclimate evidence suggests that the past few decades are the warmest period in at least a thousand years, and perhaps much longer. Some argue that the cause could be natural. But when we put the natural factors only into the climate models, they show that the climate should have cooled in recent decades if natural drivers alone were at work. We can only explain the dramatic warming that we’ve seen from human impacts—to be specific, the increased accumulation of greenhouse gases due to fossil fuel burning and other human activities.”

It doesn’t take decades of warming to cause global chaos. Heat waves like this could have immediate economic repercussions long before glaciers melt or sea levels rise. Especially if they occur in economically powerful or troubled parts of the world in succession. Modern civilization has never been forced to adapt to changes in our environment occurring this fast. Seven billion people are dependent on a fragile, overly stressed infrastructure, built on the assumption that conditions in the future will remain as they have been. Rapid climate change violates that assumption and heat waves are just one of the points of the spear potentially causing famine, financial volatility, and hyper inflation. The ingredients for economic collapse and political upheaval, extremism, and even war.

Fossil fuel industry apologists would call attempts to mitigate those effects we can control, and preparing to deal with the consequences of those we can’t, alarmism. Most people would call it wisdom.

Examiner.com