Our view: A fiery July validates global warming predictions
This month’s weather has been downright hellish in parts of the United States and across the globe, providing further evidence that the impact of climate change is no longer relegated to starving polar bears and shrinking ice caps.
In the USA, Americans awoke Monday to images of deadly wildfires scorching California and other Western states. July’s extreme weather stretched from an all-time high of
111 degrees recorded at UCLA to a record
16.4 inches of rain in Baltimore. The pattern of misery spread across the globe:
❚ Tinder-dry conditions and record heat triggered a firestorm in Greece, killing more than 90.
❚ Historic heat (106 degrees in Kumagaya) in Japan left at least 77 dead.
❚ Africa recorded its highest reliably recorded temperature in modern history: 124.3 degrees in Algeria.
❚ Record highs were also reported from Armenia to the United Kingdom to above the Arctic Circle. Torrential rains collapsed a dam in Laos, killing hundreds of people.
While no single event can be attributed to human-induced climate change, these are precisely the types of extreme weather that become much more likely because of it. “We’re now seeing decades-old scientific predictions being validated in the real world, right before our eyes,” UCLA climate researcher Daniel Swain told Axios.
Most of the political debate over climate change has been focused on whether the problem is being exaggerated. But some researchers worry that the models they’ve long relied upon to predict global warming effects might be actually underestimating changes that are underway.
The reason for all of this is uncomplicated. Greenhouse gases accumulating in the atmosphere, largely from the burning of fossil fuels, continue to rise. Carbon dioxide levels reached
400 parts per million in 2016, likely higher than the Earth has experienced in millions of years. It exceeded
410 parts per million in April. The atmosphere is operating on steroids.
This can actually provide a few benefits in the United States, as crop yields increase in a handful of northern states and cold-related deaths decline.
Such gains are easily overtaken by downsides: frequent and destructive wildfires, more heat-related deaths in many Sunbelt states, excessive rainfall and rising sea levels along the Eastern Seaboard and the Gulf Coast, and crop declines across the South and Midwest. It’s costing Americans money, both broadly across the national economy and in terms of household expenses.
A Universal Ecological Fund study last year priced the cost of climate change to the U.S. economy at an average of $240 billion a year. That total didn’t figure in the three devastating hurricanes, including the excessive rainfall in Houston, that struck America last year at a price tag estimated at $300 billion.
Studies show that extreme heat increases violent crime and slows productivity, particularly for the millions of Americans working outdoors. During the recent heat wave, electrical demand for cooling Texans peaked at the highest levels in state history, driving up air-conditioning bills.
Bloomberg tabulated a litany of other economic damage across the world: Stunted crops across West Texas’ cotton belt, threatening to halve the harvest. Hot rivers in France that can’t cool nuclear reactors, cutting electrical production. And wheat harvests in Russia, the largest exporter, potentially declining for the first time in years.
If there’s good news, it’s that more citizens understand the problem, even as Washington fritters away valuable time with its inaction: 73 percent now say there’s solid evidence of global warming, and a record 60 percent agree that humans are at least partially to blame, according to a University of Michigan survey.
The climate change skeptics claim that the nation can’t afford to take the steps necessary to combat and adapt to global warming. Months like this one prove that America can’t afford not to.