When it comes to climate change, in this heatwave, denialism and fatalism are merely postures, not serious positions. With evidence of human-caused global warming everywhere, hopeful realism is our only option.
A relentless, scorching heatwave is spreading across the Midwest and Northeast, baking half the country for days in a row. The first named storm of the hurricane season made landfall in Mexico on Thursday morning, bringing heavy rains and flooding to Texas. Florida is struggling to recover from record rains that caused widespread flooding. New Mexico and California are struggling to contain massive wildfires. And all this is happening in June, before the start of summer.
It's true that we can't attribute any weather phenomenon, including this heatwave, to climate change, but it's also true that we can't attribute any lung cancer to smoking. But according to Gallup, the percentage of American adults who smoked in 1954, before the deadly correlation between smoking and cancer was widely recognized, has plummeted to just 12% today. Anyone who claims there's no connection will be dismissed as a dangerous crank.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis sounded like a Marlboro cigarette ad when he insisted last week that the “rain bombs” that dumped about two feet of rain on parts of the state were nothing out of the ordinary. Like many Republicans, DeSantis is trying to score political points by pretending that climate change doesn't exist. In May, he signed a bill banning offshore wind turbines that provide clean energy and loosening regulations for natural gas pipelines that don't.
“We don't want energy policy to be driven by climate ideology,” DeSantis said Friday. Yet that's exactly what he's doing. Only blind ideology and personal ambition would cause a public official to willfully ignore the connection between fossil fuels and climate change. One of our nation's two major political parties has chosen to take a shameful stance on an issue that is already changing the way we live.
But people understand what's going on. Gallup reports that 62% of U.S. adults are “very” or “quite” concerned about climate change, and 61% understand that “pollution from human activities” is the primary cause of global warming. And a Pew Research Center survey found that 67% of Americans believe the country should prioritize developing alternative energy sources like wind and solar, while only 32% say it should prioritize expanding oil, coal, and natural gas production.
President Biden is doing both. The United States is producing more fossil fuels, including crude oil, than ever before, regardless of all the lies Donald Trump told us about his administration being pro-oil. Meanwhile, Biden's signature Inflation Control Act includes the largest investment in history to transition to clean energy and make the country carbon neutral by 2050, a goal supported by more than two-thirds of Americans, according to the Pew Research Center.
But for now, what's all this heat about? Why was it hotter near Burlington, Vermont (94 degrees) on Wednesday than Miami (89 degrees)?
This is where uncertainty and the jet stream come into play.
Michael E. Mann, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Science, Sustainability and Media, is a climate scientist who is much hated by climate change deniers. He was lead author of the 1998 paper that produced the famous “hockey stick” graph that shows how global temperatures have soared since the Industrial Revolution, when humans began burning fossil fuels on a large scale and releasing huge amounts of warming carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Mann's analysis is careful and cautious, and while some on social media have warned that the sudden rise in sea surface temperatures is “the sky is falling,” he says the event is the result of a rare and temporary combination of factors, not a rush toward the end of the world.
Indeed, Mann told me this week that global temperatures are rising at the rate climate scientists predicted decades ago, but these extreme weather events reflect significant uncertainties, and “uncertainty is not on our side,” he said.
The polar jet stream, which circles the globe from west to east, is caused by the temperature difference between cold air in the north and warm air in the south, he explained. What climate scientists hadn't anticipated was that the Arctic would warm up much faster than warmer latitudes. Parts of Alaska and Canada were up to 7 degrees warmer last summer than the average summer in the 1990s.
This means that the temperature difference between the Arctic and the intermediate air masses is smaller, disrupting the jet stream, which is usually wavy and linear. It now forms large loops that dip farther south, more frequently than before.
“These patterns tend to become fixed,” Mann said. “Some of the largest outbreaks of extreme weather in the U.S. and Europe are due to this phenomenon,” he said, citing the thermal dome that's now fixed over our sweaty heads as an example.
The poles are warming more rapidly than the rest of the planet, causing ice sheets and glaciers to melt faster than scientists predicted, and sea levels to rise faster than expected.
“Global warming is happening as predicted,” Mann said, “but some of the effects of warming are exceeding what the models predicted.”
In other words, the road to global warming has become rougher and faster than scientists expected, and now it's unclear what will happen around the next turn.
Mann believes “we're past the denial stage in some ways” because people understand that climate change is happening, despite the Republicans' performative rhetoric. But now he has a different concern.
“Pessimism is becoming a real threat to action,” he told me, noting that “bad people are adding fuel to the fire” behind the belief that it's already too late to do anything, and they point to these extreme weather events as evidence of that.
“The idea that we're in some kind of runaway feedback loop has never happened,” Mann said. “I want to convey a sense of urgency, but also emphasize the agency that we have.”
Humanity has already increased atmospheric carbon dioxide levels by 50 percent. The more fossil fuels we burn, the worse the effects of climate change will be. But there is still time to transition to clean energy, and we should view the challenge before us not just as an obligation, but as an opportunity.
I've been following the fight against climate change since covering the first UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. I agree with Mann: We are not losing this battle. Not yet. Remember how one of the legendary pioneers of climate science, Steven Schneider, dismissed fatalism: “The truth is bad enough.”
How has global warming changed your summers? What is your relationship with the seasons? Share your thoughts with us.
