Climate Reporter Bill McKibben laid it out clearly in his New Yorker piece on July 11, 2023, after a week that dramatically challenged any denial of climate change. Titled “Is it Hot Enough Yet for Politicians to Take Real Action?” – the article summarized what the world had just seen. Day after day, temperature records throughout the globe were broken, Canadian wildfires were still spreading smoke across North America, and roads and villages around the globe were washed away by flooding.
“Fort Good Hope, at 66.2 degrees north latitude, in Canada’s Northwest Territories (which is to say, just a few miles below the Arctic Circle), hit 99.3 degrees Fahrenheit on Saturday afternoon, surpassing the old record by four degrees. The town of Norman Wells, a little to the south, topped a hundred. These are close to the high-temperature record anywhere that far north; it was hotter there over the weekend than it has ever been in the Canadian capital of Ottawa, which is twenty degrees latitude to the south. Canada was far from alone: Beijing experienced more than a week straight of temperatures higher than ninety-five degrees in a record heat wave affecting hundreds of millions of people (authorities opened air-raid shelters, some dating from the Japanese invasion in 1937, as cooling centers); temperatures were a hundred and twenty-two degrees in Kuwait and Iraq; on Thursday, Africa recorded its hottest nighttime ever, with the temperature at one site in Algeria failing to drop below 103.3 degrees Fahrenheit.
Those temperatures are driving, again precisely as scientists have predicted, a cascading series of disasters around the world. Remember one of the essential facts of our century: warm air holds more water vapor than cold. In dry areas that leads to drought, but once that water is in the air it’s going to come down. In the past few days, we’ve seen devastating flooding and mudslides in Japan (Al Jazeera reported that the rain had brought “southwestern Japan to a halt”), China (where more than a dozen people died in seasonal mountain floods, even amid a heat wave), northern India (where bridges and buildings were washing into rivers), Spain (cars were swept away down narrow streets), and the Hudson Valley, where roads disappeared and the historic buildings at West Point are feared to have sustained damage. My neighborhood in Vermont is under a high flood-risk warning as I write this; a little to the south of us they’ve been conducting high-water rescues of stranded campers, and downtown Montpelier, the state capital, had flooded catastrophically…
Is It Hot Enough Yet for Politicians to Take Real Action?
“…So the crisis is everywhere–that’s why it’s called global warming.”
-Climate reporter Bill McKibben
Meanwhile, members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) were meeting. In addition to the war in Ukraine, there was greater urgency surrounding discussions of the impact of climate change on global security. On July 12, 2023, NATO’s website included this text about climate change:
“The earth’s rapidly changing climate and an increase in weather extremes have led NATO to accelerate its efforts in environmental security and environmental protection…Climate change causes complications for fresh water management and water scarcity, as well as health issues, biodiversity loss and demographic challenges. Other consequences like famine, drought and marine environmental degradation lead to loss of land and livelihood, and have a disproportionate impact on women and girls, and poor and vulnerable populations.
Climate change is also a threat multiplier that affects NATO security, operations and missions both in the Euro-Atlantic area and in the Alliance’s broader neighbourhood. It makes it harder for militaries to carry out their tasks. It also shapes the geopolitical environment, leading to instability and geostrategic competition and creating conditions that can be exploited by state and non-state actors that threaten or challenge the Alliance. Increasing surface temperatures, thawing permafrost, desertification, loss of sea ice and glaciers, and the opening up of shipping lanes may cause volatility in the security environment. As such, the High North is one of the epicentres of climate change.”
Insurance companies that issue home coverage policies announced recently that they would stop offering insurance in many parts of California due to the impact of wildfires and other catastrophic weather events. With the recent flood destruction seen in the Northeast, it may not be long before those insurers stop offering coverage to homes and businesses that saw water rushing into their lower levels, and in some cases, washing entire structures away.
For many years, climate scientists have warned us that this is what would happen if we took little or not action to stop it. Now, dramatic climate change is happening, and we must face it as “the new normal.” We must do what we can to mitigate against the inevitable, unbearable heat, and the resulting flooding. All of which also causes some of the equipment we use in our daily lives to stop functioning.
And to keep this undeniable change from getting even worse, we must stop burning fossil fuels, stop producing and using plastics, stop the types of incessant growth and development that is killing the earth and its inhabitants.
