Regardless of its cause or origin, the climate crisis is unfolding right before our eyes, every single day.
I’m tired of holding back when it comes to discussing climate change. From now on, I won’t worry about offending anyone or sparking political debate. Enough is enough.
Climate change and the climate crisis are not hoaxes. They are not, and should never have been, political issues. It’s absurd that they’ve become so polarized, and it infuriates me.
It’s certainly not a partisan issue — it should be a bipartisan one.
An everyone issue.
Because the climate crisis affects everyone, everywhere.
“Were summers this hot when you were a kid? Wasn’t there less torrential rain? Don’t you remember more snow on the ground in winter? However we measure the facts, people are waking up and seeing that the climate is fundamentally different now.” -Erin Brockovich1
The Storms are Getting Stronger
Asheville, North Carolina after Hurricane Helene caused massive destruction. Photo by Bill McMannis on Flickr, Creative Commons license (CC BY 2.0).
You don’t have to look very long or very hard to find real-life evidence of the climate crisis. Hurricane Helene, which has taken the lives of over 230 people as of today, is a recent result of the changing climate. This hurricane destroyed areas in the mountains of western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee – where people never expected a storm like this to affect them with such severity. These areas are hundreds of miles inland.
That hurricane also hit Florida and caused massive flooding. Now, another major hurricane—Hurricane Milton—will make landfall in Florida sometime tomorrow. That’s two major storms in just a couple of weeks!
Hurricane Milton “explosively” intensified from a Category 1 storm to a Category 5 in just about 12 hours. This is the strongest storm in the Gulf of Mexico since 2005. Florida hasn’t even had a chance to finish cleaning up from the last storm, and the ground is already saturated. Some areas are still partially buried in feet of sand. This is a terrible situation. UPDATE 10/11/2024: Hurricane Milton made landfall as a Category 3 at Siesta Key, Florida, spawned an unexpected number of tornados, and left a lot of destruction behind. So far, 16 people are dead.
What’s worse, Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, doesn’t believe in climate change. In fact, in May 2024, he signed legislation that removed the words “climate change” from many Florida state laws.2 I’m not sure how he ignores the obvious climate issues in his own state.
We’re seeing record-breaking weather extremes in storms and weather patterns. We’re also seeing drastic changes in climate, such as air temperature and ocean temperatures.
Climate change creates a downward spiral because everything in nature connects. The more carbon dioxide, the warmer the planet gets, including the ocean. The warmer the ocean, the more strength hurricanes gain as they develop. The bigger the storm, the more moisture it accumulates. The warm water is their fuel.
“The impact of global warming is obvious with the hurricanes because the frequency is increasing so dramatically, especially over the last 10 or 20 years. The hurricanes are thriving off of the warmer ocean temperatures and intensifying as they’re making landfall, especially in the Gulf of Mexico.” -Dr. Reed Timmer, Extreme Meteorologist3
It’s Hotter
We’ve set heat records every year in recent decades. July 2024 was the warmest July on record for the planet in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s 175-year record.4 Last year, 2023 became the warmest year on record for land and ocean areas individually in both hemispheres.5
There have been 14 consecutive months of record-hot global temperatures, spanning from June 2023 through July 2024. This breaks the previous record (May 2015 through May 2016) for longest record-warm global temperature streak in modern record (since 1980). Each month of record global temperatures, compared to the 1991-2020 average, is shown in sequence. Places that were warmer than average are red; places that were cooler than average are blue. Image by NOAA Climate.gov, based on data from NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information.
Remember when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned of global warming levels reaching 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels? Well, we are already at 1.2°C!6
Here’s what the 1.5°C means: “Climate scientists have long warned that, to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, we need to drastically cut climate pollution and limit global warming as close as possible to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. Every fraction of global warming beyond this level exponentially increases climate harm, as well as the risk of crossing tipping points in the climate system – which would trigger abrupt and irreversible changes and accelerate warming. In other words, tipping points are points of no return.”7 This is the downward spiral I referred to above.
The Ice Really is Melting
Melting glacier ice, Alpefjord, Northeast Greenland National Park. Photo by GRID-Arendal on Flickr, Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).
Glaciers, of which there are approximately two hundred thousand on the planet, are melting. In daily life, this may not be so evident. However, to those monitoring the glaciers, it is very evident. We have accelerated glacial loss from 6.7 inches per year in the 1980s, to 11 inches per year in the 1990s, to 1.6 feet per year in the 2000s, and to 2.9 feet per year for the 2010s.8 This is directly causing sea level to rise, among many other problems. For example, warmer water expands, furthering the rise.
“Glacier front positions of Jakobshavn Isbræ from Khan et al. (2015) (1850–1985) and CCI products derived from ERS, Sentinel-1 and Landsat data by ENVO (1990–2016). The background map is a Landsat-8 image from 16 August 2016 (from the U.S. Geological Survey). Location names that occur in the text are marked. The inset shows the location of Jakobshavn Isbræ in Greenland.”9
“The blue line shows the current boundary between the Jakobshavn Glacier (right side, light gray) and the floating ice (center, white) between the valley walls (top and bottom, dark gray). The other colored lines show where this boundary was in previous years.” Graphic by Michalea King, Creative Commons license (CC BY-ND).
“The bleak face of rapid climate change is everywhere, from the shattered surfaces of Greenland’s glaciers to the marble-white branches of bleached coral forests; from the increased number of more ferocious storms to the migrations of some marine species to new, cooler locations; accompanied, throughout, by the rapid die-off of other species already stressed by human predation, pollution, and habitat destruction.” -Sylvia A. Earle10
Sea Level is Rising…And Entire Islands are Disappearing
Photo by Chris Boese on Unsplash.
Seas rose in the 1800s by half an inch. The 1900s saw almost 7 inches in sea level rise. In just the first two decades of the 2000s, we’ve reached a rate of 12 inches, and it continues to accelerate. Scientists expect another rise of 10 to 12 inches in just 30 years, by 2050.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the projections for U.S. sea level rise depend on the path we follow. “If we are able to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, U.S. sea level in 2100 is projected to be around 0.6 meters (2 feet) higher on average than it was in 2000. But on a pathway with high greenhouse gas emissions and rapid ice sheet collapse, models project that average sea level rise for the contiguous United States could be 2.2 meters (7.2 feet) by 2100 and 3.9 meters (13 feet) by 2150.”11
Loss of Land
More severe storms, combined with sea level rise, are causing the loss of lands, especially islands. Vanuatu has already relocated one village and the country is one of the most vulnerable to sea level rise. But the Maldives, Kiribati, Tuvalu, and the Marshall Islands are at a high risk of island loss as well. In 2018, Hurricane Walaka wiped out a whole island near Hawaii; an island that was a critical habitat for several endangered species.12
“When sea levels rise, people will be displaced – likely those least responsible for the climate crisis…If these peoples are forced to leave a no longer habitable island nation, who is responsible for providing refuge?” -Leah Thomas13
We Must Do Better
What can we do? Yes, we can all make small changes in our daily lives, but the most critical step is voting. Once we’ve voted, we must hold our elected leaders accountable and push them to take meaningful, large-scale actions to slow the climate crisis. While it can no longer be entirely stopped, we can still slow its progress. It’s time to get everyone involved, set aside the “hoax” claims, and focus on moving forward together.
We must do better.
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I have mostly stayed away from writing about political issues on my website since I feel that political disagreement takes away from trying to achieve the greater good. But I feel that I can no longer avoid certain issues, especially since pollution and climate change should not be political issues. These are human issues.
In more than one way recently, the Supreme Court has gotten it wrong.
The Case
The Supreme Court recently ruled in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) does not have the authority to issue broad, aggressive regulations on climate-warming pollution from power plants that might force many of those plants to close or rebuild. It potentially restricts other agencies from passing regulations to protect both the environment and public health.1
“The case was unusual because it focused on a program that wasn’t even in force: the Clean Power Plan, an Obama-era federal regulation adopted under the Clean Air Act of 1970, which sought to govern greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.” The Clean Power Plan would have required utilities to move away from coal and toward renewable energy.
After a series of lawsuits from Republican states and the coal industry, the Supreme Court blocked the program in 2016 and it never took effect. “The Biden administration tried to have the case dismissed, arguing that there were no E.P.A. regulations in place for the court to consider. That didn’t work and, in the end, the court favored the plaintiffs…who argued that only Congress should have the power to set rules that significantly affect the American economy.”2
“It was the product of a coordinated, multiyear strategy by Republican attorneys general, conservative legal activists and their funders to use the judicial system to rewrite environmental law, weakening the executive branch’s ability to tackle global warming.” -Manuela Andreoni, New York Times3
Photo by Alexei Scutari on Unsplash.
Greenhouse gases
The greenhouse effect is what it sounds like, in that if you have a covered garden, you are purposely trapping the heat inside. The Earth’s atmosphere does the same thing, as natural greenhouse gases trap heat and keep our habitat warm. However, human activities are responsible for unnatural increases in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere over the last 170 years. This increases the temperature across the planet, hence causing what we call global warming. “The largest source of greenhouse gas emissions from human activities in the United States is from burning fossil fuels for electricity, heat, and transportation.” Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the primary greenhouse gas, accounting for nearly 80% of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. “The main human activity that emits CO2 is the combustion of fossil fuels (coal, natural gas, and oil) for energy and transportation.”4
Photo by Marek Piwnicki on Unsplash.
Greenhouse Gas Emissions
The electricity sector is the second-largest source of greenhouse emissions in the United States (after transportation). This accounts for 25% of the U.S.’s emissions. “Approximately 60% of our electricity comes from burning fossil fuels, mostly coal and natural gas.”5
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the leading scientific authority on global warming, explains that exceeding a 1.5 degrees Celsius increase would cause climate change’s worst impacts. This means more intense droughts, extreme heat, massive flooding, and the worsening of food shortages, wildfires, and even poverty. It also means the decline of all species. That includes a mass die-off of the world’s coral reefs which actually help regulate the oceans and climate.
Because since the Industrial Revolution, the Earth has already heated 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit).
“The failure of the United States — the largest emitter of greenhouse gases in history — to meet its climate targets would very likely mean the world will not be able to keep global warming at about 1.5 degrees above preindustrial levels. Beyond that threshold, scientists say, the likelihood of catastrophic heat waves, drought, flooding and widespread extinctions increases significantly.”6
Photo by Tobias Rademacher on Unsplash.
Running Out of Time!
We are running out of time to stall massive problems. Once global warming reaches a certain point, it will create a spiral effect. Several articles mentioned how the Supreme Court’s decision will limit “Biden’s plan” or “Biden’s goal” to reduce carbon emissions. But these are not Biden’s goals, nor are they simply goals. Reducing carbon emissions is a requirement! It is a necessary move that the entire globe – every developed nation – must make in order to save the people. We will not survive massive global changes, and we know this. If we want to live and see our grandchildren survive, we must change our ways.
Because we needed to start making these changes 50 years ago.
Reducing carbon emissions should be everyone’s goal, whether they like it or not.
It is not a Republican or Democratic issue.
It’s a human issue.
But the Supreme Court has punted clean air regulations to Congress, and we know that governing body consistently cannot get anything done. Our bipartisan Congress argues and filibusters and achieves nothing.
