Drilling the point home about overheated planet
It’s yet another clear, bright sunny day in the 70s during what should be Northern California’s winter storm season. I’ve witnessed hurricanes in Louisiana and Texas, glacial retreat in Antarctica and Alaska, and coral bleaching in Florida and Fiji, but I’ve never seen such a pleasant expression of catastrophic climate disruption.
Like the statewide firestorms after California’s multiyear drought (that we’re hopefully not going back into, though Southern California is well on the way) and the record-breaking $306 billion of extreme-weather losses suffered across the nation in 2017 — more than half linked to Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria — the blocking high-pressure zone that has moved most of “our” California storms north strongly correlates with the loss of Arctic sea ice.
A recent study led by scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and UC Berkeley found that more heat being stored in the Arctic Ocean is leading to changes in atmospheric circulation and the buildup of a high-pressure system in the eastern Pacific. It is what one meteorologist is calling California’s “ridiculously resilient ridge.”
Modeling suggests that loss of Arctic ice could result in a 10 to 15 percent reduction in California rainfall over time. Unfortunately, that time seems to include now.
Reporting on climate a decade ago, I was always given the caveat by scientists that no single weather event could be attributed to humanen-hanced climate change, although the trend line was clear. Now the state of science has advanced so that two studies were recently able to attribute 19 to 38 percent of the unprecedented rainfall and flooding during Hurricane Harvey to fossilfuel-fired climate change.
And that’s why every member nation of the United Nations has signed on to the Paris climate agreement to transition the world away from fossil fuels toward job-generating clean energy. Of course, the Trump administration is withdrawing the United States from that treaty and trying to open up California and most of the rest of our public seas to oil drilling.
When California first began to move away from offshore drilling after the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill, it was still a question of marine pollution versus energy, but today it’s become a product liability question. This product, used as directed, overheats our planet, acidifies our seas and sometimes gives us springtime in winter.
That’s why people are protesting offshore drilling in Sacramento, and that’s why millions of Americans will be wearing blue for the ocean and Marching for the Ocean on June 9 in Washington, D.C., the Bay Area and around the world.
Meanwhile, all these dry, warm winter days are giving me the chills. David Helvarg is an author and executive director of Blue Frontier, an ocean conservation group, and steering committee member of the March for the Ocean, at www.marchfortheocean.org