Image: Wikimedia Commons

“Summer is hot” isn’t exactly breaking news. These months are supposed to be hot.  This summer, however, will be the hottest of modern times if recent trends continue.

Here’s the trend:

• May 2024 was the hottest May since the 1940s.

• April 2024 was the hottest April since the 1940s.

• March 2024 was the hottest March since the 1940s.

• February 2024 was the hottest February since the 1940s.

I could keep going all the way back to June 2023. In each and every one of those months, the average global surface temperature was the highest in almost a century. The last nine months it exceeded the 1.5C increase from pre-industrial times which the 2015 UN Paris Agreement set as the goal to avoid serious problems.

For now, at least, we are there. A 1.5C increase is no longer unimaginable. It’s happening.

Image: Copernicus ECMWF

This isn’t news to millions of people in Asia, which is (again) having a deadly heat wave. In Delhi, India, a weather station recorded a 52.9C (127.2F) high on May 29. That’s disturbingly close to the 54.4C Death Valley high in July 2021, which (for now) is the highest temperature ever recorded anywhere on Earth.

But Death Valley is, well, Death Valley. No one lives there. Delhi has almost 22 million residents, many of them poor with no means to escape the heat. Some can’t even get water. News photos show people holding buckets, desperate to get what they can as tanker trucks try to reach everyone.

Mexico City isn’t far behind. Heat waves combined with failing infrastructure, low rainfall and depleted aquifers have authorities saying the city will start running out of water as soon as this month.

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Excess heat and scarce water are two sides of the same coin. Neither is fun and they aggravate each other.

This is partly due to simple physics. Warmer air absorbs water that would otherwise stay accessible on the surface. At higher temperatures the water raises humidity, further immiserating us, or eventually becomes rain – often a lot of rain all at once, causing floods.

The amount of “precipitable water” hit a record high last year and is doing so again this year.

Image: Jeff Berardelli

The rest is just math. The planet has a fixed amount of water. If more of it stays in the atmosphere as vapor, then our lakes, rivers and aquifers necessarily contain less.

Even if your area has a clean water supply, your access to it probably depends on electricity, the reliability of which is increasingly dubious. Even in the US, power outages of more than a few hours can shut down municipal water systems.

From there, the situation spirals quickly. Water enables civilization. Humans don’t do well without it. I had a small taste of this in the 2021 Texas winter storm and don’t want to relive the experience. I’ve since made sure we are better prepared for the next one.

What would you do if your area suddenly lost its water supply, and leaving wasn’t an option? It’s a real and growing risk.

Here’s a small, simple step: Store some bottled drinking water at home. You can handle discomfort, but without clean water you will quickly get dehydrated, sick or both. Safe water should be a top priority.

Plan on having a gallon per person, per day, for a week-long crisis. It doesn’t have to be the best spring water; just clean and securely packaged. Gallon jugs are less expensive than small bottles. Buy them now and you can both save money and avoid the crowds.

Also check out this CDC page on Making Water Safe in an Emergency. In a pinch, you can use common household bleach to purify water from unknown sources.  Powdered lemonade or drink mix can improve the taste.

This is a small step almost anyone can take. If a heat wave and water crisis should find you, you’ll wish you had done a lot more.

But first you have to survive… and without water, you won’t.

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Image: pxhere

Climate change is raising sea levels as oceans get warmer and polar ice caps melt. That’s not news. I’ve figured this was a longer-term problem, except for some unfortunate low-lying island nations. Waves are a few inches higher don’t really affect anyone yet.

This turns out to be wrong. Higher seas are a problem now, even in the US, and it’s worsening quickly.

Last month The Washington Post published a study of flooding along the US southern coast (see Part 1 and Part 2, unlocked). They pulled data from federal tide gauges and compared them with satellite data from the rest of the world. 

The findings are pretty stark: sea level has been rising for decades and is rising even faster now. For example, at Dauphin Island, Alabama, the average sea level rose a total of 3.5 inches in the 30 years from 1980-2009. Then it rose another 6.7 inches in 2010-2023.

Chart: Washington Post

Some places are worse. At Galveston, Texas, sea level rose 14.5 inches in the last 43 years, with more than half of that occurring in the last 13 years.

If that rate continues – or accelerates even more – the next decade will bring greater problems than we thought. But it’s a problem right now, in particular during flood situations.

The rainwater dropped by big storms flows downhill, ultimately to the ocean. Once there, it can’t go any lower. As sea level rises, the flood water has less room to run, so it backs up and causes more damage. Scientists calculated flood volume in one 2023 incident was about 10% more than it would have been for an identical storm occurring in 1967.

Compounding the problem is that in some places, the land is also sinking. This is wreaking havoc on storm drains and other flood control systems. Scientists expect it to get even worse.

This means you don’t have to live on the coast to be vulnerable. Simply being near the coast (or any flood-prone area) will increasingly put you at risk.

In Jacksonville, Florida, a study by local authorities found more than a quarter of major roads could become unusable amid flooding. Residents in previously low-risk areas face much higher risks.

Inches matter, too. Dr. Andrew Dessler of Texas A&M explained it really well in a post last year. Quoting:

“If you’re struggling to understand why the impacts of climate change suddenly seem so awful, it’s time we discuss a key scientific term: non-linearity.

“In a linear system, changes occur in a straight line. If climate impacts were linear, each 0.1°C increase in temperature would produce the same increment of damage. In this world, things slowly get worse over decades until, later this century, the accumulations of slow impacts become truly terrible.

But impacts of climate change are different — they are non-linear. In a rain event, for example, the first few inches of rain typically produce no damage because existing infrastructure (e.g., storm drains) were designed to handle that much rain.

“As rainfall continues to intensify, however, it eventually exceeds the capacity of the storm runoff infrastructure and the neighborhood floods. You go from zero damage if the water stops half an inch below the front door of your house to tens of thousands of dollars of damage if the water rises one additional inch and flows into your house.

“Thus, the correct mental model is not one of impacts slowly getting worse over decades. Rather, the correct way to understand climate change is that things are fine until they’re not, at which point they’re really terrible. And the system can go from ‘fine’ to ‘terrible’ in the blink of an eye.”

Note, too, all this is a problem even without hurricanes or tropical storms. Those get more attention, but the myriad smaller-scale impacts may be a much greater threat over time.

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Again, there’s no reason to think sea level will stop rising and many reasons to think it will rise a lot more. We aren’t reducing carbon emissions enough to stabilize air and sea temperatures.

All these problems will likely get worse before they get better. Prepare now.

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Image: oilpainting-repro.com

The beautiful image you see above is from Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, a series of 1830s woodblock prints by the Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai. You can see iconic Mount Fuji in the background.

In the foreground is the also-beautiful Lake Suwa, which has something to tell us about climate change. 

Lake Suwa is in Nagano prefecture, site of the 1998 Winter Olympics. Cold winters made this lake famous for its omiwatari (“God’s Crossing” in Japanese) ice ridges. These form when repeated freezing and thawing builds an elevated path across the water.

Local Shinto priests attributed this unusual event to a male deity crossing the lake to visit a female deity enshrined on the other side. They thought it notable and so in 1443 started keeping track of the lake’s ice conditions, inadvertently generating centuries of valuable climate data.

The records show Lake Suwa froze almost every year until about 1800. After the Industrial Revolution and growing CO2 emissions, it now freezes only about half the time. That rate is diminishing, too.

We see similar changes elsewhere, albeit without the data trail. North America’s Great Lakes ice coverage hit a record low in 2024, for example.

Japan has another handy long-run climate indicator: Cherry blossoms. The spring flowering is a major event there. Kyoto, the ancient capital city, has records of the date cherry trees blossomed going back to the 9^th century. Those are the green dots in this chart. The blossoms appear sooner in warmer-than-average years.

Chart: Roger Coppock

The year-to-year variation is substantial, but the trend curve shows the blossoms appearing earlier starting around 1900.

More modern records show the same for cherry trees in both Kyoto and Washington D.C.

Chart: National Geographic

Other things like an “urban heat island” effect probably play a role in this. But it makes intuitive sense that CO2-induced warmer temperatures would mean earlier spring weather, causing plants to flower earlier in the year.

This matters because flowers are part of a complex seasonal ecosystem.

Plants, animals, insects and microbes all depend on each other to do certain things at certain times. They can evolve to changing conditions, but sudden change is harder. And on Mother Nature’s timescale, a few decades or even a century count as “sudden.”

All this came to mind when I saw this post by a meteorologist.

@DerekOrtt on X

We can debate what is causing higher average temperatures. I think the connection to carbon emissions is pretty clear. Some people insist it’s just natural variability, solar cycles, etc. As Derek points out, we are in even more trouble if climate change isn’t man-made.

But whatever the cause, modern instruments and ancient scrolls show the atmosphere is warmer now. The effects are worsening: Wildfires, floods, hurricanes, and more.

This means even if we could somehow get to net zero today (a pipe dream), the next decade or two are still going to be rough. Emissions may be close to a peak, but they are not falling.

That means adaptation isn’t really a choice. We’re going to do it. The choice is to adapt now or later… when it will be much harder and cost much more.

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

Dubai, the fabulous desert city in the United Arab Emirates, just experienced a mind-boggling flood event. Dubai’s airport on average receives 3.73 inches of rain per year. This week it got 5.59 inches in a single 24 hour period. Other parts of the UAE saw as much as 10 inches.

This is not normal. That amount of rain more than doubles the region’s 1-in-100 year storm probability. Some climate change skeptics tried to blame it on cloud seeding flights, but the storm was already forecasted several days earlier.

We don’t know exactly how climate change may have affected this. We do know global warming is about more than heat. Warmer air holds more moisture, which then travels via clouds. More water caught up in transit means drought in some places and the opposite in others: short periods of intense rainfall, causing more floods.

Humans have become pretty skilled at controlling floods with dams, levees, and reservoirs. Often these help farmers and supply water to cities. All good… except most were designed for conditions that no longer exist.

Just this month, for example, workers in Utah noticed an ice sheet floating on unusually high water had caused a 60-foot crack in the Panguitch Lake Dam, about 10 miles upstream of a town. Had the dam broke, the town would have been washed away within hours, along with any of the 1,800 residents who didn’t evacuate fast enough.

Fortunately, local authorities moved fast, piling giant boulders over the crack and opening floodgate to relieve pressure on the dam. What would have been a major disaster became a minor news footnote.

But these close calls are happening more often. Last year a huge rainstorm in Libya collapsed the two Wadi Derna dams, unleashing floodwaters that killed more than 10,000 people downstream.

Those dams appear not to have been well maintained. But unstable dams aren’t unique to unstable developing countries. The US has over 2,200 of them, according to a recent Associated Press analysis. Many were built 50 or more years ago. Since then, a lot of development has happened in the flood zones below these dams.

This means flooding isn’t just a coastal problem. Millions of people are potentially just hours away from seeing their homes inundated. How do you prepare for that?

First, know the threat. It’s highly specific to your local topography. But if you live near any kind of lake, river or stream, think about how high that water could rise in an extreme rainstorm. Assume it will go significantly higher than ever before.

Second, if your location is vulnerable, have an evacuation plan. Where will you go and what will you take with you? Thinking ahead pays off.

Third, if you’re a homeowner, look into protecting your property. You might be able to do some landscaping that looks nice and holds back the water, too. Small fixes to your plumbing can help keep water (and worse, sewage) out of the house, too.

Watch this fascinating Japanese TV show about how flooding happens. It’s only 15 minutes, with English dubbing and subtitles.

Video: NHK World Japan

In the video, you’ll see an amazing test of a Japanese home designed to actually float above flood waters. I’m not sure US building codes would allow that here, but the concept still makes a good point.

We aren’t powerless against these increasingly common disasters.  We have options. We just have to use them.

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Image: Sciline

This thing we call “climate change” used to be “global warming.” That was better because heat is the core problem. Thanks to our greenhouse gases, Earth is absorbing more of the sun’s energy than it can reflect away into space. This additional energy stays here as heat.

The oceans are absorbing most of that heat. But starting about a year ago, the already-warming seas began warming even faster.

Unlike some climate statistics, we don’t have to deduce this from tree rings and other ancient history. We have reliable data from modern instruments.

Look at the chart below.

• The faint gray lines show each year’s daily sea temperature from 1981-2022.

• The black line is the 1982-2011 average.

• The red line is 2023.

• And the dark red line is 2024 through early March.

Chart: Nahel Belgherze

The oceans were much warmer in 2023 than the recent average. Starting in mid-March, every single day brought a global sea surface temperature higher than any year since 1981. And so far, 2024 is even warmer.

Something new seems to be happening on top of the global warming that was already underway.

What could it be?

One candidate is the periodic “El Niño” climate pattern, which warms the Pacific Ocean. It happens every few years and happened again starting last summer.

But sea temperatures had already begun the unusual climb months earlier. Climate scientists say the El Niño is certainly contributing but doesn’t fully explain this.

Another factor could be the January 2022 Hunga Tunga volcano eruption, which sent giant amounts of water vapor into the atmosphere. This would have had a warming effect, too. But again, the experts think it’s not a sufficient explanation.

Nothing else fits, either. These suddenly higher sea temperatures have the experts scratching their heads. They didn’t expect it and don’t know why it is happening.

Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute, said in a recent New Yorker story, “We don’t really know what’s going on. And we haven’t really known what’s going on since about March of last year.”

University of Miami hurricane researcher Brian McNoldy says, “It’s not like we’re breaking records by a little bit now and then. It’s like the whole climate just fast-forwarded by fifty or a hundred years. That’s how strange this looks.”

In my experience, when scientists say they don’t know, they really mean they don’t know. They want to see more data before drawing conclusions.

For the rest of us, this kind of unresolved mystery is unsettling – especially if you live near the US Atlantic coast, where everyone knows from experience warmer water makes hurricanes more intense.

Here’s a chart like the one above, but this time for the North Atlantic. It shows the same kind of 2023 and 2024 anomalies.

Chart: Nahel Belgherze

And here’s a map showing global sea surface temperatures in February. Orange and red shades mean that area was warmer than its 1991-2020 average.

Map: Jeff Berardelli

Note the area I circled in yellow. That’s “Hurricane Alley,” the ocean west of Africa where the storms that strike the US and Caribbean region typically originate. The water was very warm there compared to previous February data.

I am no weather forecaster but it’s really hard to imagine this is good… and easy to think it could mean more and worse hurricanes this year.

Cyclonic storms seem to be getting stronger as well as more frequent. Category 5 hurricanes have become so common, scientists are discussing whether to add a “Category 6” to the familiar 1-5 scale.

Last year’s Acapulco disaster was a terrifying example. Otis went from a run-of-mill tropical storm to a Category 5 hurricane in less than a day. Its maximum wind speed increased by 105 mph in a 21-hour period.

If you live anywhere near a coastline, this should get your attention. A lot of evidence says you should expect more storms, stronger storms, and possibly less warning time.

Nor is it just an east coast and Gulf coast thing. Otis hit Mexico’s west coast, the first recorded Pacific category 5 storm to make landfall. And this was the same year tropical storm Hilary struck California. Yes, a tropical storm hit California for the first time in 80 years. That ought to be a warning.

The coastal residents I know are pretty good at storm preparation. But I’m not sure they are prepared for what may be coming next.

If that’s you, consider using the next few months to get ready for a “worst case” storm far worse than anything you’ve ever seen.

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This was not a natural disaster. Investigators already found a decayed wooden utility pole that had fallen, with sparks then igniting the dry brush. And because it was in such a remote area, no one noticed until the fire was out of control.

That’s bad news for the utility company that will probably pay out millions in damages, but it ought to alarm everyone. Poles like that are everywhere, many are old, and they’re getting even older while the climate changes around them.

Image: PublicDomainPictures.net

Nor are power poles the only ignition source. Lightning, sparks from power tools, vehicle exhaust, a dropped cigarette – any of those plus high temperatures and low humidity can start a small fire. Add high winds to blow burning debris, and they can get out of control quickly.

The problem isn’t entirely climate change. Humans are also spreading into once-wild areas we previously left unoccupied. But the climate does seem to be changing in ways that make it all worse.

Global temperatures are certainly rising:

Chart: Financial Times

In Texas, our official state climatologist (yes, we have one) expects by 2036 the average temperature will run 3.0 degrees F warmer than the 1950-1999 average, and the number of 100 degree days will nearly double.

Combine that with drought and falling aquifer levels and even drier conditions are likely - so we should expect more and bigger wildfires.

I don’t think Texas is unique in this. Other states could be in even worse shape. What happened in Canada last year should be a warning.

This concerns me personally because my home is in a vulnerable area outside Austin. Improving our fire defenses is one of my top goals this year. I want to protect the property as best we can and be ready to leave quickly if necessary. (How? I’ll share more in future articles.)

But here’s the worst part. It’s not just Texas and not just fires.

Everything humans have built was designed for climate conditions that no longer exist. Our homes, roads, bridges, tunnels, airports, harbors, utility services, all our infrastructure was built on the assumption future weather extremes would look much like past extremes.

Was that a good assumption? Back then, maybe so. Not anymore.

Living in a place where wildfires are unlikely doesn’t mean you are safe. If, for instance, you live downstream from a dam built 50+ years ago to withstand what was then thought to be a once-in-a-century storm scenario, you should think about flood risk.

Wherever you may be, you are vulnerable to climate change impact. We have screwed up on a global scale, so we are going to have global problems.

This leaves three choices:

·         Deny anything new is happening, or

·         Believe it and do nothing, or

·         Believe it and get ready.

How do you get ready? Identify your vulnerabilities, plan ways to minimize them, then go on with life.

We can adapt. But the longer we wait, the harder it will be.

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Image: Harvard Kennedy School

Reducing those emissions would stop or at least limit the warming. We (i.e., the world collectively) could do this by not burning so much oil, gas, and coal. But we’re actually burning more fossil fuels and emitting more CO2, and we are years, maybe decades, from significant reductions.

The International Energy Agency just released its 2023 emissions data. Global carbon emissions rose 1.1% to 37.4 billion tons last year, a new record.

Chart: Financial Times

Some media stories correctly point out emissions fell in developed countries. But they rose enough elsewhere to offset that drop and more.

In the big picture, emissions have the same effect no matter who emits them. They all enter the same atmosphere and disperse around the globe. The amount is growing, not falling.

Looking at the chart, you might say emissions are beginning to stabilize. They aren’t growing as fast as in recent decades. IEA says emissions growth would have been 3X higher over the last year without clean energy efforts.

That’s good news, but we still have a problem. The chart below compares what is happening with what needs to happen.

Chart: productiongap.org

Researchers compiled production forecast data from energy agencies in the top 20 energy-producing nations. Add them all together and you get the top line of the chart. It’s expressed in “GtCO2eq/yr” or gigatons of CO2 equivalent per year. A gigaton is 1 billion tons.

The two gold lines are the emissions those same governments claim they are going to allow. The solid one is their stated policies and the dashed one is official pledges. You can see these are nowhere near what the same governments expect to actually happen.

The green line is the emissions level that would limit the global temperature increase to 2 degrees C by 2050. The blue line below it is the even safer 1.5 degree goal. The shaded areas around them are the margins of error.

If all this is right, it means emissions aren’t even in the same neighborhood we need.

The best case scenario shown would be for all countries to fulfill their announced pledges and reach the green target zone…  in the late 2030s.

To say that’s not ideal is an understatement.

You see how the weather is already changing. That will continue because the already-emitted gases will stay in the atmosphere for centuries. Meeting these targets would simply keep the climate from getting catastrophically worse. But given we are nowhere near the targets it probably will get worse.

This is why we need to electrify everything and decarbonize our energy sources. Fossil fuel consumption will fall if other sources are cheaper. We also need cleaner fuels for trucks, ships, and planes.

Many smart people are working to make all that happen. I’m optimistic they’ll succeed, but not soon enough to avoid major climate-driven disasters and disruption.

Now is our chance to prepare.

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Image: Printerval

It turns out being displaced from your home is surprisingly common, even in the United States. Last week the New York Times, citing new Census Bureau data, reported (that’s an unlocked link, btw) some 2.5 million Americans had to flee from weather-related disasters in 2023. The year before, it was 3.3 million.  Hurricanes were the most commonly cited cause, followed by floods and fires.

This kind of data has been elusive because many events aren’t federally declared disasters. There are also large numbers of “low attention disasters” that may affect only a few homes. But of course, they’re still terrible for the people involved.

The US population is 330+ million. If these years are typical, it means something like 1% of can expect to be forced from home by some kind of weather event in any given year. Those may seem like good odds. But remember, you get another shot every year. So over 10-20 years the chances are considerably higher.

In many cases, evacuation isn’t so bad. You heed the hurricane warning, go see relatives inland for a few days, then go back home – which is hopefully still intact. Not a big deal. But it’s not always so simple, nor will you necessarily have much warning time.

Moreover, there’s every reason to think these kinds of events will grow bigger and more common in the near future – increasing the chance you’ll be caught in one. And climate change is only part of the problem. More people live in vulnerable areas – coastlines, wooded areas vulnerable to fires, low-lying potential flood zones, etc.

You may live in such an area and not even know it.

To find out, go to RiskFactor.com and enter your address. It will give you a 1-10 danger rating for flood, fire, wind, air pollution and heat. The data comes from First Street Foundation, which does risk modeling for property insurers.

But no matter what the models say, it’s a good idea to at least think about how you would evacuate if necessary. Where will you go? How will you get there? What should you take with you? How can you prepare your home to survive the kind of disasters that would drive you away?

The answers to those questions will come easier if you think about them before the disaster is upon you.  “Grab your beer and run like hell” isn’t a plan. A few hours of real planning and preparation could save you a lot of money – and maybe your life.

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In many cases, though, the deniers don’t deny what’s happening. They just think it doesn’t matter.

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In their view, the climate is always changing, summer is always hot, winter is always cold. They see no cause for worry, nor any reason to limit their carbon emissions.

We have good answers to those points. Yes, summer is always hot, but seeing it get much hotter, everywhere, all at once is new. And there’s a direct path from rising average temperatures to more frequent and intense storms, droughts, and other disasters.

People can – and often do – agree the weather is getting crazy but differ on the causes. They’re just not convinced human activity is causing it.

On one level, that’s easy to understand. Admitting fault is always hard. Many people spend their whole lives depending on fossil fuels because that’s just life. They don’t mean any harm. The idea they’re unknowingly hurting other people is a hard pill to swallow. So, they choke on it.

Image: pixahive

I think this attitude is pretty common. It’s a lot more common than the smug, total denial we see online.

Understanding the full impact of our collective human choices is a process. It takes time, and some people need more time. Particularly since the energy industry spends a lot of money trying to obscure reality.

So how do you deal with denial? It’s getting more important as climate conditions worsen. We may be talking about your spouse, or your parents, or your boss or customers. Preparing for what’s ahead will be more difficult if the people around you aren’t on the same page.

I think the best answer is to meet them where they are. You don’t have to start arguments. Find points of agreement and build on them.

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If, for example, your spouse doesn’t believe carbon emissions are a problem, let it pass. But maybe remind them how high that creek behind your house rose last spring, and that you don’t want to get flooded. You’ll probably find they don’t want to get flooded, either.

Then mention your friend in Texas who lost power for a week during that ice storm, how terrible it was, and maybe ya’ll should think about what you would do in such a situation.

After you point out a few things like that, your spouse may start to see these aren’t imaginary risks, your family really is vulnerable, and some precautions would be wise.

None of that requires believing in man-made climate change. But it’s a step in the right direction. You may be surprised how fast more steps follow.

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Bad news: That +1.5^◦C goal is already starting to elude us – and not just for a day or two. The 12 months ending January 2024 showed 1.52^◦C of warming vs the 1850-1900 average.

As this chart shows, the trend has been steadily upward since the 1970s. The average can vary quite a bit from year to year due to El Nino events, solar activity, volcanoes, etc., but it keeps rising. We’re running out of wiggle room even as global carbon emissions keep rising.

(Chart: BBC)

We are entering the danger zone. Yet many folks still think two degrees is no big deal. (Fellow Americans, please note 2^◦ Celsius is equal to 3.6^◦ on the Fahrenheit scale.)

Two degrees is enough to matter. We all know this already. Our bodies can tell the difference. Ever gone to bed and then feel hot or cold? I’ll bet so. And I’ll bet adjusting your thermostat just one or two degrees restored your comfort.

If the human body is that temperature-sensitive, it should be easy to believe the planet is, too.

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Nor is it just humans. Animals sense the difference, too. We can actually calculate the air temperature from how fast crickets chirp. Temperature changes tell many species when to reproduce, go dormant or migrate. Abnormal heat can send disease-carrying insects like mosquitos to places where they didn’t previously go.

(Image: Pixabay)

Fish know it, too. They spend their lives swimming around in search of optimal conditions, part of which is temperature. They can move a long way if something, like global warming, changes the sea temperature even slightly above or below their ideal. This is a growing problem for the fishing industry and an even bigger problem for marine life that can’t easily relocate, like coral. Those species can die, which has other not-so-good effects.

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It also matters which degrees are changing. A three-degree change at room temperature is one thing. Going from 30^◦F to 33^◦F is different. That “small” amount of warming turns frozen ice into liquid water.  When this happens in your freezer, it makes a small mess. If it happens in Antarctica? A much bigger mess.

The atmosphere itself is temperature sensitive, too. Warmer air holds more moisture – about 7% more per each degree Celsius. This affects the weather, making storms more intense, but that’s not all. The Earth has a fixed total amount of water. If higher temperatures keep more water suspended in the air, it means less water at ground level where humans can use it. This isn’t good, as people in drought-stricken regions can attest.

See the problem? Even small temperature changes can have giant effects on us and the natural world that sustains us.

That’s why climate change, even just 2^◦C, is going to hurt.

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Climate change is beginning to disrupt our weather. It will get worse in the coming years. If your local community isn’t prepared for it (few are), you have three choices:

1.       Gamble you’ll be okay, or

2.       Move somewhere safer, or

3.       Prepare as best you can.

Most people choose door #1, either because they don’t think climate change is real or they just don’t know what to do. I get it. We all have other priorities.

As for #2, nowhere is really safe. The particular dangers vary by location, but the magnitude is much the same.

Furthermore, even if you could find a safer place, you would also be leaving a place you know. Think about that carefully, especially if you have family and neighbors you can trust. Those roots can take years to rebuild – years you may not have.

I think in most cases, it’s better to stay where you are. But how exactly do you prepare? What does that mean?

The first step is to know what might happen.

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The common thread is heat – more heat than was previously normal in any given place. And, like a row of dominoes, the heat affects other things.

(Image: Pixabay)

Texas Tech climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe has a nice description of the effects we’re already seeing:

• Intense, prolonged heatwaves. These include the record-breaking ones we’ve seen around the world in recent years, from Asia to Europe to North America.

• Heavier precipitation. Warmer air holds more water vapor. Carbon-induced warming gives storms more moisture to sweep up and dump on the ground. This can produce massive inland flooding.

• Stronger droughts. In drier regions, warm temperatures increase evaporation, drying soils and strengthening the high pressure systems associated with drought. The high pressure systems, in turn, can repel storms, depriving dry places of much-needed rain.

• Larger wildfires. In fire-prone areas such as western Canada and eastern Australia, fires are burning over massively wider areas, due to the abundance of kindling that dry conditions can make of wooded and grassy areas.

• Stronger hurricanes, tropical cyclones, and typhoons. A warmer planet means warmer oceans, which absorb over 90% of the excess heat resulting from climate change. As storms form and pass over warmer water, they absorb more heat and water vapor, supercharging them and boosting the damage they cause on landfall.

Another one is that winters, while generally warmer, can still bring “polar vortex” events where temperatures drop far below normal for short periods. They can do a lot of damage. (And yes, odd as it sounds, global warming can cause colder weather.)

In one sense, climate change is really climate amplification. It’s the same kind of bad weather we’ve long known. The difference is it’s becoming more frequent and more intense.

It’s also happening in unexpected places: subzero temperatures in Texas, 110 degrees in Seattle.

The actual weather events aren’t the end, either. Other problems flow from them.

• Floods and rain can breed mosquitos carrying unpleasant or even deadly diseases.

• Storms can knock out your water and electric utilities, possibly for weeks after the weather clears.

• Damaged roads and infrastructure can reduce your access to everything you normally depend on.

The good news: most of these problems are temporary. They’re disruptive for a while, then everyone adjusts.

But you still need to get through them alive and reasonably well. And the odds some kind of climate disaster will touch you are getting higher every year.

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Back in the 1980s and 1990s, people around me scoffed at the whole idea. I did, too, especially on cold days. “Ha ha, here’s that global warming those nutty scientists talk about.” But I never bothered to really learn what they meant.

Later I looked into it and realized lots of data from many different sources pointed to rising global average temperatures, coincident with our rising carbon emissions. But it looked like serious problems were still decades away. We have time to fix all this, I thought.

I wasn’t wrong. We had time, but we didn’t use it well. Here’s a chart showing Earth’s average land temperature relative to an 1850-1900 baseline. You can see how the warming trend accelerated after about 1980.

Or, shown another way, here is the average temperature by month. Each line represents one year since 1850. The black one on top is 2023. It was the hottest year on record every month from June through yearend.

The reason isn’t complicated. Despite all kinds of efforts, global carbon emissions are still climbing.

And if OPEC’s oil demand forecasts are correct, it will get worse in the next five years. The cartel expects fossil fuel consumption to grow about 10% by 2028 in the emerging market countries (mainly China and India) while the OECD (wealthy) countries keep burning as much they do now.

Was 2023 just an especially hot year? Maybe. Other things are happening: an “El Nino” weather pattern, a big volcanic eruption last year, the sun’s natural cycles. But the trend is clear. Filter out the noise and the world is on track to reach 1.5C warming in less than 10 years.

That means we’re going to have problems.

In fact, we’re already having problems: extreme, unprecedented weather events all over the world. Just in the last year we saw a whole town burn in Hawaii… giant forest fires in Canada… a flood in Manhattan… heatwaves in Europe… seawater flowing up the Mississippi River toward New Orleans… a drought hobbling the Panama Canal… high sea temperatures killing Florida’s coral reefs… and continued polar ice cap shrinkage.

All this will only get worse as average temperatures continue to rise. The future isn’t the future anymore. It’s here.

We might be in a better spot if more of us had taken this seriously years ago.  We didn’t. Now we have to face the situation as it is, not as it could have been.

We have two tasks:

• Continue all the current decarbonization efforts and activism. Even if we can’t stop the train, slowing it down will help.

And…

• Prepare our families and communities for years of increasingly extreme weather.

These two are equally important but the second one – what I call “Climate Survival” – needs more attention. That’s where I intend to focus this publication.

Getting through these times will force all of us to learn new skills. Having endured a couple of weather disasters, my wife Grace and I have thought a lot about how to make our home – and ourselves – more resilient.

Changing weather is only the first manifestation of climate change. Dealing with the second-order effects will be challenging, too.

• Our physical infrastructure – roads, bridges, dams, vehicles, homes – is designed for conditions that no longer exist. A lot of it will break down or stop working at all.

• Worse, our food system is built for optimal conditions, too. We raise certain kinds of crops and livestock in certain places that have always worked well. What if they stop?

• Animal life – including insects – will be on the move, bringing dangerous microbes to new places. More pandemics and disease could follow.

• I don’t expect civilization to collapse. I’m not retreating into end-of-the-world prepper mode. Nevertheless, I believe life is going to change dramatically until we somehow stop the planetary warming trend. Even the most optimistic climate scientists say that’s years away.

Climate Survival News will help you get through these years intact – and help others do the same.