Three-quarters of Earth’s land has become drier since 1990.

Droughts come and go – more often and more extreme with the incessant rise of greenhouse gas emissions over the last three decades – but burning fossil fuels is transforming our blue planet. A new report from scientists convened by the United Nations found that an area as large as India has become arid, and it’s probably permanent.

A transition from humid to dry land is underway that has shrunk the area available to grow food, costing Africa 12% of its GDP and depleting our natural buffer to rising temperatures. We have covered several consequences of humanity’s fossil fuel addiction in this newsletter. Today we turn to the loss of life-giving moisture – what is driving it, and what we are ultimately losing.

Why is the land drying out so fast? It’s partly because there is more heat trapped in the atmosphere by greenhouse gases emitted from burning fossil fuels. This excess heat has exacerbated evaporation and is drawing more moisture out of soil.

‘Oil, not soil’

Climate change has also made the weather more volatile. When drought does cede to rain, more of it arrives in bruising downpours that slough the topsoil.

A stable climate would deliver a year’s rain more evenly and gently, nourishing the soil so that it can nurture microbes that hold onto water and release nutrients.

This is the kind of soil that industrial civilisation inherited. It’s disappearing.

“Soil is being lost up to 100 times faster than it is formed, and desertification is growing year on year,” says Anna Krzywoszynska, a sustainable food expert at the University of Sheffield.

“The truth is, the modern farming system is based around oil, not soil.”

Fossil fuels have unleashed agriculture from the constraints of local ecology. Once, the nutrients that were taken from the soil in the form of food had to be replaced using organic waste, Krzywoszynska says. Synthetic nitrogen fertilisers, made with fossil energy at great cost to the climate, changed all that.

Next came diesel-powered machinery that brought more wilderness into cultivation. Farm vehicles as heavy as the biggest dinosaurs now churn and compact the soil, making it difficult for earthworms and assorted soil organisms to maintain it.

Tractors and chemicals served humanity for a long time, Krzywoszynska says. But soil is now so degraded that no amount of fossil help can compensate.

“Across the world, soils have been pushed beyond their capacity to recover, and humanity’s ability to feed itself is now in danger.”

Green pumps and white mirrors

The primary way that we have been making up for lost food yield is turning more forests into farms. This is accelerating our journey towards a drier, less liveable world because forests, if allowed to thrive, create their own rain.

“Water sucked up by tree roots is pumped back into the atmosphere where it forms clouds which eventually release the water as rain to be reabsorbed by trees,” say Callum Smith, Dominick Spracklen and Jess Baker, a team of biologists at the University of Leeds who study the Amazon rainforest.

“In the Amazon and Congo river basins, somewhere between a quarter and a half of all rainfall comes from moisture pumped from the forest itself.”

Image by MAMADOU TRAORE from Pixabay

Some experts have argued that the UN report understates Earth’s growing aridity by overlooking the water that is held in snow caps, ice sheets and glaciers. Climate change is melting this frozen reservoir, which also serves as a seasonal source of water.

“And as water in its bright-white solid form is much more effective at reflecting heat from the sun, its rapid loss is also accelerating global heating,” says Mark Brandon, a professor of polar oceanography at The Open University.

How do we adapt our relationship with the land to remoisturise the world? Krzywoszynska argues that there is no easy solution, but the future of food-growing “is localised and diverse”.

“To ensure that we eat well and live well in the future, we’ll need to reverse the trend towards greater homogenisation which drove food systems so far.”

The good news, according to Krzywoszynska, is that farmers are experimenting with methods that restore the soil even as they produce a diverse range of nutritious food. These innovators need rights and secure access to the land, the opportunity to share their experiences and financial and political support.

“Regenerating land is a win-win, for humans and their ecosystems, if we dare to look beyond the immediate short-term horizon,” she says.

Jack Marley, Environment + Energy Editor, The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Heat and drought would rank high on this list. The Middle East is heating twice as fast as the global average. Egypt and Iraq are especially vulnerable to sea level rise. Some of the consequent threats can only be dealt with by inter-governmental cooperation. But that kind of cooperation is hard to come by as things now stand.

An example of a cross-border problem is the substantial reliance of numerous MENA nations on imported food, especially grains, which renders them vulnerable to global food price fluctuations caused by climate-related events (or wars) in other regions.

We saw this problem in the Russia-Ukraine War, which threatened Middle East wheat supplies. But climate-drive mega-droughts could have similar implications.

MENA countries are not well positioned to deal with climate change impacts, they point out, given that governments tend to be highly centralized, with power concentrated in the hands of oligarchs or juntas dependent directly or indirectly on oil and gas. The oligarchs are out for themselves, seeking “rents” from oil-rich countries where they don’t have such mineral wealth themselves. They exclude from decision-making grass-roots organizations, workers, the poor and women, who are often on the front lines of global heating and know better than the air-conditioned, petroleum-swigging elites how dangerous it is. All this is true for individual countries. Imagine getting them to cooperate on climate resilience or the green energy transition across borders.

The oligarchs of the region promote water-intensive crops like citrus fruits for export even in arid countries, because they can make money on the exports, and even though their countries have to import a lot of food. That is, they could put in staples like grain instead of citrus fruits, but then they wouldn’t make money from exports. Their people would, however, be less hungry.

For another example, they say, the elites in Tunisia concentrate on olive cultivation for the world market (it is the third largest producer). But there are so many olive orchards and so few of any other sort of crop that the country is making difficulties for itself. Monocultures are especially vulnerable to disease outbreaks or global price fluctuations. The olive orchards drink up the country’s agricultural water, making it hard for farmers to put in other crops.

Embed from Getty Images
An irrigation system is used in an olive grove located in Siliana, Tunisia, on May 10, 2024. Farmers face a major problem in keeping their fields productive due to water stress and drought. (Photo by Chedly Ben Ibrahim/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

In Libya, the army controls much of the economy. The country is heavily dependent on oil exports, and suffers when petroleum prices plummet. The country imports 75% of its food, so if anything disrupts the global food supply chain, Libyans are in big trouble. Petroleum is mostly used to fuel vehicles, but as the world electrifies and goes to EVs, Libyans will be up the creek if they don’t find another source of wealth.

There are five big categories of cross-country threats, they say:

1.The Biophysical: “risks for trans-boundary ecosystems, such as international river basins, oceans and the atmosphere.” They give the example of Turkey’s dam-building at the headwaters of the Euphrates, which is threatening water flows in Iraq, which depends on two large rivers for survival. Climate change is also reducing flow. Iraq could be in big trouble over this trans-boundary problem.

2. Financial. Foreign direct investment in the region could fall substantially because of climate impacts, hampering infrastructure projects. Lack of infrastructural adaptation could hurt efforts to come to terms with climate change.

3. Trade: “Potential risks to international trade, such as the import and export of climate-sensitive crops and implications for food security.” MENA imports 50% of its food from the outside, and if there are droughts elsewhere in the world things could turn very dangerous.

4. People-Centered: They point to the millions of displaced people in the region. Half of Syrians had to move house during the Civil War, in which a major drought was probably implicated. Some 11 million Sudanese have been displaced by the current civil war, in a population of 48 million. They don’t say so, but the Nile Delta in Egypt is very populous (60 million people) and very low-lying, at risk from the rising waters of the Mediterranean. God knows where they will go.

5. Geopolitical. This term refers to regional conflict. We see this (this is me, not the report) in Lebanon, where Israel’s attacks have displaced 1.2 million people. There are only about 4.5 million Lebanese.

While Europe has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to help MENA countries begin the transition to solar and wind energy, it has offered very little money to help Middle Eastern countries become more resilient in the face of climate change.

The authors note that the Middle East and North Africa is a diverse geographical area. It has its famous deserts but also mountain ranges, green valleys like Lebanon’s Biqa’ (now being bombed by Israel), long river valleys, mangrove stands along the seas, and swamps in southern Iraq.

The way contemporary analysts categorize the Middle East, it stretches from Iran in the east to Morocco in the far west, and from Syria in the north to Yemen in the south. Nearly 500 million people inhabit the area, and many states within it still have high birth rates, giving it millions of youths. The median age is something like 22 or 24, compared to 38.5 for the United States. Like India and Africa, it is young.

Some parts of the region are desperately poor, others are fabulously wealthy. Outside the petroleum states, they point out, parts of Syria, Iraq, Yemen, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and Libya, are low-income, conflict-impacted societies facing severe challenges like human displacement and acute poverty. Simultaneously, middle-income nations like Morocco and Egypt are proactively exploring business opportunities within the global green transition.

Morocco and Turkey are virtually the only countries in the area that have had some success transitioning their grids to sustainable sources of energy, though much poorer Morocco is more advanced in wind and solar, while Turkey depends more heavily on hydroelectricity.

( RFE/ RL ) – Record temperatures, prolonged droughts, and the drying up of rivers and lakes are displacing tens of thousands of Iranians each year, experts say.

Many of the climate migrants are farmers, laborers, and fishermen who are moving with their families from the countryside to major urban areas in Iran in search of alternative livelihoods.

Iranian officials have blamed worsening water scarcity and rising desertification on climate change. But experts say the crisis has been exacerbated by government mismanagement and rapid population growth.

While the exact number of climate migrants is unknown, Iranian media estimated that around 42,000 people in 2022 were forced to migrate due to the effects of climate change, including drought, sand and dust storms, floods, and natural disasters. The estimated figure for 2021 was 41,000. Observers say the real figures are likely much higher.

Experts say a growing number of Iranians are likely to leave rural areas as more areas of Iran — where most of the land is arid or semiarid — become uninhabitable every year.

“It is visible because Iran is very dry, there is little rainfall, and a significant part of the country is desert,” Tehran-based ecologist Mohammadreza Fatemi told RFE/RL. “As a result, the slightest change in the climate affects the population.”

Fatemi cited the drying up of the wetlands and lakes in Iran’s southeastern province of Sistan-Baluchistan as an example. The Hamun wetlands were a key source of food and livelihood for thousands of people. But as the wetlands have diminished, many locals have migrated to the cities.

“Many people lived there, [but] they all moved to [the provincial capital] Zahedan and [the city of] Zabol,” said Fatemi. Now, he adds, many are moving from these cities to other provinces.

Environmentalist Mehdi Zarghami from Tabriz University recently estimated that some 10,000 families have left Zabol for other parts of Iran during the past year due to drought and sandstorms.

Fatemi estimates that around 70 percent of migration inside Iran is driven by the effects of climate change. “We’ve entered the phase of crisis. The next level could be a disaster,” he said.

‘Water Bankruptcy’

Some Iranian officials have warned that many parts of the Islamic republic could eventually become uninhabitable, leading to a mass exodus from the Middle Eastern country.

In July, officials warned that more than 1 million hectares of the country’s territory — roughly equivalent to the size of Qom Province or Lebanon — is essentially becoming unlivable every year.

Aljazeera English: “Iran drought: Residents flee villages as water shortages set in”

In 2018, then-Interior Minister Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli said that drought and water scarcity could fuel “massive migration” and eventually lead to a “disaster.”

Iran is among the countries most vulnerable to climate change in the Middle East, which is warming at twice the global average.

Ahad Vazifeh of Iran’s Meteorological Center said in October that average temperatures in Iran had increased by 2 degrees in the past 50 years.

But experts say that climate change only partly explains the environmental crisis that Iran is grappling with.

Tehran’s failed efforts to remedy water scarcity, including dam building and water-intensive irrigation projects, have contributed to the drying up of rivers and underground water reservoirs.

Kaveh Madani, the director of the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment, and Health, told RFE/RL’s Radio Farda that Iran’s “water bankruptcy” had been fueled by government mismanagement and the building of dozens of dams.

“Iran’s consumption is more than its natural sources of water,” he said. “Therefore, [the authorities are] using underground sources of water. [In response,] the wetlands have dried up, rivers have dried up, and now climate change has added to this equation.”

“Temperatures are rising, there’s more dust, soil erosion will increase, and desertification will increase,” predicted Madani, a former deputy head of Iran’s Environment Department.

The government’s mismanagement of Iran’s scant water resources has triggered angry protests in recent years, especially in drought-stricken areas.

Water scarcity has also led to conflict. Iran and Afghanistan engaged in deadly cross-border clashes in May after Tehran demanded that its neighbor release more upstream water to feed Iran’s endangered southeastern wetlands.

Social Problems

Some experts say rapid population growth in Iran has also contributed to the environmental crisis, although growth has slowed in recent years.

Iran’s population has more than doubled since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, rising from about 35 million to almost 88 million, with about 70 percent of the population residing in cities.

Climate migration has put a growing strain on infrastructure and created socioeconomic problems in Iranian cities, including rising poverty, homelessness, and overcrowding, experts say.

Researcher Mohammad Reza Mahbubfar told the Rokna news site in February 2021 that Tehran was a major destination for many of the country’s climate migrants. “Contrary to what officials say — that Tehran has a population of 15 million — the [real] figure has reached 30 million,” he said.

Mahbubfar added that “unbalanced development” had “resulted in Tehran being drowned in social [problems].”

The influx has led some wealthier Tehran residents to move to the country’s northern provinces, a largely fertile region that buttresses the Caspian Sea.

“My mother, who has a heart problem, now spends most of her time in our villa in Nowshahr,” a Tehran resident told Radio Farda, referring to the provincial capital of Mazandaran Province.

“My husband and I are hoping to move there once we retire to escape Tehran’s bad weather and pollution,” the resident said.

Reza Aflatouni, the head of Iran’s Land Affairs Organization, said in August that about 800,000 people had migrated to Mazandaran in the past two years.

Local officials have warned that Mazandaran is struggling to absorb the large influx of people.

Elahe Ravanshad of RFE/RL’s Radio Farda contributed to this report

Via RFE/ RL

( RFE/ RL ) – A top UN official expressed concerns that Afghanistan has been excluded from global discussions on climate change, despite being among the top 10 countries worldwide facing climate-related issues.

Afghanistan has been excluded from the UN’s global climate summit talks since the Taliban takeover in 2021.

Roza Otunbaeva, head of the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), highlighted the impact of climate change and drought conditions on the poverty level of the country and pointed to the importance of Taliban-driven initiatives, such as the Amu Darya River water project.

The comments came in an interview published on August 29 by RFE/RL’s Kyrgyz Service.

One issue of concern, Otunbaeva said, is the massive canal project begun by the Taliban to divert water from a key river to help the farming sector of northern Afghanistan. But some Central Asian nations worry over how the project could reduce water supply to their regions.

“[Taliban rulers] are digging a hundred kilometers of the channel aiming to deliver water from Amu Darya River. They are going to farm new places and want to have independence on food security,” she noted.

“However, this is a very dangerous point for our neighborhood (Central Asian countries) because of [resulting] water issues,” said Otunbaeva, who served as the interim president of Kyrgyzstan in 2010-11.

The Taliban administration has prioritized the Qosh-Tepe canal project, begun in early 2022, with the aim of allocating Amu Darya waters among the Central Asian states — Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan — a plan that originated during the Soviet era.

In November, independent Afghan climate activist Abdulhadi Achakzai attended as the only representative of his nation at the UN Conference of Parties (COP27) in the resort city of Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt.

The 2021 Global Climate Risk Index positioned Afghanistan as the sixth most vulnerable country to climate-related threats.

Afghanistan faces frequent natural disasters that are endangering life, livelihoods, homes, and infrastructure.

Hundreds of Afghans die every year in torrential rains, landslides, and floods, particularly in rural areas where poorly built homes are often at risk of collapse.

The UN has said that decades of war, environmental degradation, and climate change have made a growing number of Afghans vulnerable to natural disasters.

Via RFE/ RL

Copyright (c)2023 RFE/RL, Inc. Used with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Ste 400, Washington DC 20036.

In early April 2003, as American forces sought to wrap up their conquest of the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, and take strongholds to its north, the Marine Corps formed “Task Force Tripoli.” It was commanded by General John F. Kelly (who would later serve as Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff). His force was charged with capturing the city of Tikrit, the birthplace of dictator Saddam Hussein. The obvious eastern approach to it was blocked because a bridge over the Tigris River had been damaged. Since the Marines assembled the Task Force in northeastern Baghdad, its personnel needed to cross the treacherous, hard-flowing Tigris twice to advance on their target. Near Tikrit, while traversing the Swash Bridge, they came under fire from military remnants of Saddam’s regime.

Still, Tikrit fell on April 15th and, historically speaking, that double-crossing of the Tigris was a small triumph for American forces. After all, that wide, deep, swift-flowing waterway had traditionally posed logistical problems for any military force. It had, in fact, done so throughout recorded history, proving a daunting barrier for the militaries of Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon and the Achaemenid Cyrus the Great, for Alexander the Great and Roman Emperor Justinian, for the Mongols and the Safavid Iranians, for imperial British forces and finally General John H. Kelly. However, just as Kelly’s stature was diminished by his later collaboration with America’s only openly autocratic president, so, too, in this century the Tigris has been diminished in every sense and all too abruptly. No longer what the Kurds once called the Ava Mezin, “the Great Water,” it is now a shadow of its former self.

Fording the Tigris

Thanks at least in part to human-caused climate change, the Tigris and its companion river, the Euphrates, on which Iraqis still so desperately depend, have seen alarmingly low water flow in recent years. As Iraqi posts on social media now regularly observe in horror, at certain places, if you stand on the banks of those once mighty bodies of water, you can see through to their riverbeds. You can even, Iraqis report, ford them on foot in some spots, a previously unheard-of phenomenon.

Those two rivers no longer pose the military obstacle they used to. They were once synonymous with Iraq. The very word Mesopotamia, the premodern way of referring to what we now call Iraq, means “between rivers” in Greek, a reference, of course, to the Tigris and the Euphrates. Climate change and the damming of those waters in neighboring upriver countries are expected to cause the flow of the Euphrates to decline by 30% and of the Tigris by a whopping 60% by 2099, which would be a death sentence for many Iraqis.

Twenty years ago, with President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, two oil men and climate-change denialists, in the White House and new petroleum finds dwindling, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world for them to use the 9/11 horror as an excuse to commit “regime change” in Baghdad (which had no role in taking down the World Trade Center in New York and part of the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.). They could thereby, they thought, create a friendly puppet regime and lift the U.S. and U.N. sanctions then in place on the export of Iraqi petroleum, imposed as a punishment for dictator Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

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There was a deep irony that haunted the decision to invade Iraq to (so to speak) liberate its oil exports. After all, burning gasoline in cars causes the earth to heat up, so the very black gold that both Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush coveted turned out to be a Pandora’s box of the worst sort. Remember, we now know that, in Washington’s “war on terror” in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, the U.S. military emitted at least 400 million metric tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And mind you, that fit into a great tradition. Since the eighteenth century, the U.S. has put 400 billion — yes, billion! — metric tons of CO2 into that same atmosphere, or twice as much as any other country, which means it has a double responsibility to climate victims like those in Iraq.

Climate Breakdown, Iraqi-Style

The United Nations has now declared oil-rich Iraq, the land on which the Bush administration bet the future of our own country, to be the fifth most vulnerable to climate breakdown among its 193 member states. Its future, the U.N. warns, will be one of “soaring temperatures, insufficient and diminishing rainfall, intensified droughts and water scarcity, frequent sand and dust storms, and flooding.” Sawa Lake, the “pearl of the south” in Muthanna governorate, has dried up, a victim of both the industrial overuse of aquifers and a climate-driven drought that has reduced precipitation by 30%.

Meanwhile, temperatures in that already hot land are now rising rapidly. As Adel Al-Attar, an Iraqi adviser to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) on water and habitat, describes it, “I’ve lived in Basra all my life. As a boy, the summer temperature never went much beyond 40C (104° F) in summer. Today, it can surpass 50C (122° F).” The climate statistics bear him out. As early as July 22, 2017, the temperature in Basra reached 54 °C (129.2° F), among the highest ever recorded in the eastern hemisphere. The rate of Iraqi temperature rise is, in fact, two to seven times higher than the average rate of global temperature rise and that means greater dryness of soil, increased evaporation from rivers and reservoirs, decreasing rainfall, and a distinct loss of biodiversity, not to mention rising human health threats like heat stroke.

The American war did direct harm to Iraq’s farmers, who make up 18% of the country’s labor force. And when it was over, they had to deal with staggering numbers of explosives left in the countryside, including landmines, unexploded ordnance, and improvised explosive devices, many of which have since been dangerously covered by desert sands as a climate-driven drought worsens. An article in the journal of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences observes that when it comes to military disruptions of waterways, “Displacement, explosions, and movement of heavy equipment increase dust that then settles on rivers and accumulates in reservoirs.” Worse yet, between 2014 and 2018 when the guerrillas of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, whom the American war helped bring into existence, took over parts of northern and western Iraq, they blew up dams and practiced scorched-earth tactics that did $600 million worth of damage to the country’s hydraulic infrastructure. Had the U.S. never invaded, there would have been no ISIL.

Dust and More Dust

As Al-Attar of the ICRC observed, “When there’s not enough rain or vegetation, the upper layers of earth become less compact, meaning the chance of dust or sandstorms increases. These weather events contribute to desertification. Fertile soil is turning into desert.” And that is part of Iraq’s post-invasion fate, which means ever more frequent dust- and sandstorms. In mid-June, the Iraqi government warned that particularly violent dust and thunderstorms in al-Anbar, Najaf, and Karbala provinces were uprooting ever more trees and flattening ever more farms. In late May in Kirkuk, a dust storm sent hundreds of Iraqis to the hospital. A year ago, the dust storms came so thick and fast, week after week, that visibility was often obscured in major cities and thousands were hospitalized with breathing problems. In the late twentieth century, there already were, on average, 243 days annually with high particulate matter in the air. In the past 20 years, that number has reached 272. Climate scientists predict that it will hit 300 by 2050.

A little over half of Iraq’s farmed land relies on rain-fed agriculture, mostly in the north of the country. Iraqi journalist Sanar Hasan describes the impact of increasing drought and water scarcity in the northern province of Ninewah, where yields have shrunk considerably. Ninewah produced 5 million metric tons of wheat in 2020 but only 3.37 million in 2021 before plummeting by more than 50% to 1.34 million in 2022. Such declining yields pose a special problem in a world where wheat has only grown more expensive, thanks in part to the Russian war on Ukraine. Thousands of Iraqi farming families are being forced off their lands by water shortages. For example, Hasan quotes Yashue Yohanna, a Christian who worked all his life in agriculture but now can’t make ends meet, as saying, “When I leave the farm, what do you expect me to do next? I’m an old man. How will I afford the cost of living?”

Worse yet, southern Iraq’s marshlands are turning into classic dust bowls. The Environment Director of Maysan Governorate in southern Iraq recently announced that its al-Awda Marsh was 100% dried up.

The marshes at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers have been storied for thousands of years. The world’s oldest epic, the Mesopotamian tale of Gilgamesh, is set there as it describes a hero journeying to an enchanted garden of the gods in search of immortality. (Echoes of that epic can be found in the biblical story of the garden of Eden.)

Our addiction to fossil fuels, however, has contributed significantly to the blighting of that very source of life and legend. It was there that marsh dwellers once hauled in a majority of the fish eaten by Iraqis, but the remaining wetlands are now experiencing increasingly high rates of evaporation. The Shatt al-Arab, created where the Tigris and Euphrates flow together into the Persian Gulf, has seen its water pressure drop, allowing an influx of salt water that has already destroyed 60,000 acres of farmland and some 30,000 trees.

Many of Iraq’s date palms have also died owing to war, neglect, soil salinization, and climate change. In the 1960s and 1970s, Iraq provided three-quarters of the world’s dates. Now, its date industry is tiny and on life support, while Marsh Arabs and southern farming families have been forced from their lands into cities where they have few of the skills needed to make a living. Journalist Ahmed Saeed and his colleagues at Reuters quote Hasan Moussa, a former fisherman who now drives a taxi, as saying, “The drought ended our future. We have no hope, other than for a [government] job, which would be enough. Other work doesn’t fulfill our needs.”

Water as Women’s Work

Although it was mostly men who planned out Iraq’s ruinous wars of the past half-century and set their sights on burning as much petroleum, coal, and natural gas as possible for profit and power, Iraq’s women have borne the brunt of the climate crisis. Few of them are in the formal job market, though many do work on farms. Because they are at home, they have often been given responsibility for providing water. Because of the present drought conditions, many women already spend at least three hours a day trying to get water from reservoirs and bring it home. Water foraging is becoming so difficult and time-consuming that some girls are dropping out of secondary school to focus on it.

At home, women are dependent on tap water, which is often contaminated. Men who work outside the home often gain access to water purified for Iraqi industry and its cities. As farms fail owing to drought, men are emigrating to those very cities for work, often leaving the women of the household in rural villages scrambling to raise enough food in arid circumstances to feed themselves and their children.

Last fall, the International Organization for Migration at the United Nations estimated that 62,000 Iraqis living in the center and the south of the country had been displaced from their homes by drought over the previous four years and anticipated that many more would follow. Just as people from Oklahoma fled to California in droves during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, so now Iraqis are facing the prospect of dealing with their own dustbowl. It is, however, unlikely to be a mere episode like the American one. Instead, it looms as the long-term fate of their country.

If, instead of invading Iraq, the American government had swung into action in the spring of 2003 to cut carbon dioxide output, as one of our foremost climate scientists, Michael Mann, was suggesting at the time, the emission of hundreds of billions of tons of CO2 might have been avoided. Humanity would have had an extra two decades to make the transition to a zero-carbon world. In the end, after all, the stakes are as high for Americans as they are for Iraqis.

If humanity doesn’t reach zero carbon emissions by 2050, we are likely to outrun our “carbon budget,” the ocean’s ability to absorb CO2, and the climate will undoubtedly go chaotic. What has already happened in Iraq, not to speak of the dire climate impacts that have recently left Canada constantly aflame, U.S. cities smoking, and Texans broiling in a record fashion would then seem like child’s play.

At that point, in short, we would have invaded ourselves.

Copyright 2023 Juan Cole

Via Tomdispatch.com

Josh Bootzin/Cronkite News

( Cronkite News ) – PHOENIX – All Phoenicians are familiar with heat, though resources to mitigate the health risks presented by extreme heat are not nearly as consistent from resident to resident.

In 2022, 425 heat-associated deaths were reported in Maricopa County, a 25% increase from the previous year. To curb the rise in deaths, Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego has made efforts to provide assistance and disaster relief for residents susceptible to heat exhaustion and other heat-related harms, with the creation of the Office of Heat Response and Mitigation within the city’s government.

“I made it my mission to adapt to this trend to innovate, to try to find solutions so that we are not falling behind on heat resilience,” Gallego said Friday at a news conference to discuss heat reliefs efforts.

Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego and Rep. Ruben Gallego address media questions on the proposed Excess Urban Heat Mitigation Act outside Phoenix City Hall. (Photo by Josh Bootzin/Cronkite News)

“We’re the first city with a permanent office of government that is dedicated to fighting the heat and adapting to it anywhere in the United States. The office works side by side with the entire city government to address … our city streets, our fire response programs, environmental problems and so much more,” she said.

Some of Gallego’s efforts have already been put into place. Just this week, the city reached 100 miles of cool pavement coating – a water-based product applied over asphalt that has been found to reduce surface temperatures up to 12 degrees. The Cool Pavement Program started in 2020.

In addition to Gallego’s efforts in Phoenix, U.S. Rep. Ruben Gallego, D-Phoenix, is pushing for federal heat-resistance legislation in Washington. The proposed Extreme Heat Emergency Act urges the Federal Emergency Management Agency to consider adding extreme heat to the existing list of 16 types of declared major disasters.

“When a hurricane hits in Florida or a tornado touches down in Oklahoma, the federal government steps in and provides assistance,” Rep. Gallego said. “The same should be true when extreme heat waves strike.

“My bill allows cities like Phoenix to do more in building cool pavements, add more trees, install additional bus stop covers and deploy more cooling centers around the city,” he said. “With $30 million available in funding, my bill would make a difference in keeping Phoenicians cool.”

Cronkite News: Extreme Heat – Declared Disasters List

According to the National Safety Council, heat was the second-highest death-causing weather event in 2021, and heat-related deaths are only continuing to climb. The National Weather Service reported that over the last 125 years, Phoenix experienced an average of 12 days per year that exceeded 110 degrees Fahrenheit, but that average has climbed to 21 days over the last three decades.

Gallego’s bill is not set at a specific temperature, so any of the 50 states could potentially ask for federal aid when heat becomes extreme relative to the state’s normal temperature averages. In other words, northern states would not have to experience temperatures that would be extreme for Phoenix in order to qualify for federal aid.

Currently, local governments are forced to take from their general funds in order to offer relief to residents during extreme heat situations. Under the bill, cities would work with FEMA to create better and faster aid at a lesser cost to local governments.

Rep. Gallego said he hopes to have the bill approved by next year.

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Josh Bootzin jaw-sh boot-zin (he/him)

Sports Reporter, Phoenix

Josh Bootzin expects to graduate in December 2023 with a master’s degree in sports journalism. He receive bachelor’s of arts degrees in statistics and creative writing from the University of Pittsburgh in 2021 and hopes to build a career in data journalism around proficiencies in statistics, print journalism and a love for sports.

 

Andrew Lind an-droo lind (he/him/his)

Sports Broadcast Producer, Phoenix

Andrew Lind expects to graduate in August 2023 with a master’s in sports journalism. Lind graduated from the University of Kansas in May 2022 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism.

Via Cronkite News

Oh, wait, maybe I’m a little mixed up. Maybe I wasn’t on Mars. The strangeness of it all (and perhaps my age) might have left me just a bit confused. My best hunch now, as I try to put recent events in perspective, is that I wasn’t in life as I’d previously known it. Somehow — just a guess — that afternoon I might have become a character in a science-fiction novel. As a matter of fact, I had only recently finished rereading Walter M. Miller,Jr.’s sci-fi classic A Canticle for Leibowitz, last visited in 1961 at age 17. It’s about a world ravaged by humanity (using nukes, as a matter of fact) and, so many years later, still barely in recovery mode.

I must admit that the streets I was traversing certainly looked like they existed on just such a planet. After all, the ambience had a distinctly end-of-the-world (at least as I’d known it) feel to it.

Oh, wait! I checked the news online and it turns out that it was neither Mars, nor a sci-fi novel. It was simply my very own city, New York, engulfed in smoke you could smell, taste, and see, vast clouds of it blown south from Canada where more than 400 wildfires were then burning in an utterly out of control, historically unprecedented fashion across much of that country — as, in fact, all too many of them still are. That massive cloud of smoke swamped my city’s streets and enveloped its most famous buildings, bridges, and statues in a horrifying mist.

That day, New York, where I was born and have lived much of my life, reportedly had the worst, most polluted air of any major city on the planet — Philadelphia would take our place the very next day — including an air quality index that hit a previously unimaginable 484. That day, my city was headline-making in a way not seen since September 11, 2001. In fact, you might think of that Wednesday as the climate-change version of 9/11, a terror (or at least terrorizing) attack of the first order.

Put another way, it should have been a signal to us all that we — New Yorkers included — now live on a new, significantly more dangerous planet, and that June 7th may someday be remembered locally as a preview of a horror show for the ages. Unfortunately, you can count on one thing: it’s barely the beginning. On an overheating planet where humanity has yet to bring its release of greenhouse gasses from the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas under any sort of reasonable control, where summer sea ice is almost certain to be a thing of the past in a fast-heating Arctic, where sea levels are rising ominously and fires, storms, and droughts are growing more severe by the year, there’s so much worse to come.

In my youth, of course, a Canada that hadn’t even made it to summer when the heat hit record levels and fires began burning out of control from Alberta in the west to Nova Scotia and Quebec in the east would have been unimaginable. I doubt even Walter M. Miller, Jr., could have dreamed up such a future, no less that, as of a week ago, 1,400% of the normal acreage of that country, or more than 8.7 million acres, had already burned (with so much more undoubtedly still to come); nor that Canada, seemingly caught unprepared, without faintly enough firefighters, despite recent all-too-flammable summers — having, in fact, to import them from around the world to help bring those blazes under some sort of control — would be in flames. And yet, for that country, experiencing its fiercest fire season ever, one thing seems guaranteed: that’s only the beginning. After all, United Nations climate experts are now suggesting that, by the end of this century, if climate change isn’t brought under control, the intensity of global wildfires could rise by another 57%. So, be prepared, New Yorkers, orange is undoubtedly the color of our future and we haven’t seen anything like the last of such smoke bombs.

Oh, and that June evening, once I was home again, I turned on the NBC nightly news, which not surprisingly led with the Canadian fires and the smoke disaster in New York in a big-time way — and, hey, in their reporting, no one even bothered to mention climate change. The words went unused. My best guess: maybe they were all on Mars.

Been There, Done That

In fact, you could indeed think of that June 7th smoke-out as the 2023 climate-change equivalent of September 11, 2001. Whoops! Maybe that’s a far too ominous comparison and I’ll tell you why.

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On September 11, 2001, at the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon in Washington, and aboard four hijacked jets, almost 3,000 people died. That was indeed a first-class nightmare, possibly the worst terrorist attack in history. And the U.S. responded by launching a set of invasions, occupations, and conflicts that came to be known as “the global war on terror.” In every sense, however, it actually turned out to be a global war of terror, a 20-plus-year disaster of losing conflicts that involved the killing of staggering numbers of people. The latest estimate from the invaluable Costs of War Project is: almost a million direct deaths and possibly 3.7 million indirect ones.

Take that in for a moment. And think about this: in the United States, there hasn’t been the slightest penalty for any of that. Just ask yourself: Was the president who so disastrously invaded Afghanistan and then Iraq, while he and his top officials lied through their teeth to the American people, penalized in any way? Yes, I do mean that fellow out in Texas who’s become known for his portrait painting in his old age and who, relatively recently, confused his decision to invade Iraq with Vladimir Putin’s to invade Ukraine.

Or, for that matter, has the U.S. military suffered any penalties for its record in response to 9/11? Just consider this for starters: the last time that military actually won a war was in 1991. I’m thinking of the first Gulf War and that “win” would prove nothing but a prelude to the Iraq disaster to come in this century. Explain this to me then: Why does the military that’s proven incapable of winning a war since that 9/11 terror attack still get more money from Congress than the next — your choice — 9 or 10 militaries on this planet combined, and why, no matter who’s in charge in Washington, including cost-cutting Republicans, does the Pentagon never — no, absolutely never — see a cut in its funding, only yet more taxpayer dollars? (And mind you, this is true on a planet where the real battles of the future are likely to involve fire and smoke.)

There may indeed be a “debt ceiling” in this country, but there seems to be no ceiling at all when it comes to funding that military. In fact, Republican hawks in the Senate only recently demanded yet more money for the Pentagon in the debt-ceiling debate (despite the fact that, amid other cuts, its funding was already guaranteed to rise by 3% or $388 billion). As Senator Lindsey Graham so classically put it about that (to him) pitiful rise, “This budget is a win for China.”

Now, I don’t mean to say that there’s been no pain anywhere. Quite the opposite. American troops sent to Afghanistan, Iraq, and so many other countries came home suffering everything from literal wounds to severe post-traumatic stress syndrome. (In these years, in fact, the suicide rate among veterans has been unnervingly high.)

And did the American people pay? You bet. Through the teeth, in fact, in a moment when inequality in this country was already going through the roof — or, if you’re not one of the ever-greater numbers of billionaires, perhaps the floor would be the more appropriate image. And has the Pentagon paid a cent? No, not for a thing it’s done (and, in too many cases, is still doing).

Consider this the definition of decline in a country that, as Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis continue to make desperately clear, could be heading for a place too strange and disturbing for words, a place both as old as the present president of the United States (should he win again) and as new as anyone can imagine.

Will the Climate Version of 9/11 Become Daily Life?

Throughout history, it’s true that great imperial powers have risen and fallen, but lest you think this is just another typical imperial moment when, as the U.S. declines, China will rise, take a breath — oops, sorry, watch out for that smoke! — and think again. As those Canadian wildfires suggest, we’re no longer on the planet we humans have inhabited these last many thousand years. We’re now living in a new, not terribly recognizable, ever more perilous world. It’s not just this country that’s in decline but Planet Earth itself as a livable place for humanity and for so many other species. Climate change, in other words, is quickly becoming the climate emergency.

And as the reaction to 9/11 shows, faced with a moment of true terror, don’t count on the response of either the United States or the rest of humanity being on target. After all, as that smoke bomb in New York suggests, these days, too many of those of us who matter — whether we’re talking about the climate-change-denying Trumpublican Party or the leaders of the Pentagon — are fighting the wrong wars, while the major companies responsible for so much of the terror to come, the giant fossil-fuel outfits, continue to pull in blockbuster — no, record! — profits for destroying our future. And that simply couldn’t be more dystopian or, potentially, a more dangerously smoky concoction. Consider that a form of terrorism even al-Qaeda couldn’t have imagined. Consider all of that, in fact, a preview of a world in which a horrific version of 9/11 could become daily life.

So, if there is a war to be fought, the Pentagon won’t be able to fight it. After all, it’s not prepared for increasing numbers of smoke bombs, scorching megadroughts, ever more powerful and horrific storms, melting ice, rising sea levels, broiling temperatures, and so much more. And yet, whether you’re American or Chinese, that’s likely to sum up our true enemy in the decades to come. And worse yet, if the Pentagon and its Chinese equivalent find themselves in a war, Ukraine-style or otherwise, over the island of Taiwan, you might as well kiss it all goodbye.

It should be obvious that the two greatest greenhouse gas producers, China and the United States, will rise or fall (as will the rest of us) on the basis of how well (or desperately poorly) they cooperate in the future when it comes to the overheating of this planet. The question is: Can this country, or for that matter the world, respond in some reasonable fashion to what’s clearly going to be climate terror attack after terror attack potentially leading to dystopian vistas that could stretch into the distant future?

Will humanity react to the climate emergency as ineptly as this country did to 9/11? Is there any hope that we’ll act effectively before we find ourselves on a version of Mars or, as Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, and others like them clearly wish, fossil-fuelize ourselves to hell and back? In other words, are we truly fated to live on a smoke bomb of a planet?

Copyright 2023 Tom Engelhardt

Via Tomdispatch.com

Greenhouse gas emissions are at an all-time high, with yearly emissions equivalent to 54 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide. Humanity has caused surface temperatures to warm by 1.14°C since the late 1800s – and this warming is increasing at an unprecedented rate of over 0.2°C per decade. The highest temperatures recorded over land (what climate scientists refer to as maximum land surface temperatures) are increasing twice as fast. And it’s these temperatures that are most relevant to the record heat people feel or whether wildfires spawn.

These changes mean that the remaining carbon budget for 1.5°C – the amount of carbon dioxide global society can still emit and keep a 50% chance of holding temperature rise to 1.5°C – is now only around 250 billion tonnes. At current emission levels, this will run out in less than six years.

These are the findings of a new report that I have published with 49 other scientists from around the world. It tracks the most recent changes in emissions, temperatures and energy flows in the Earth system. Data that can inform climate action. For example, by informing how fast emissions need to fall to meet international temperature goals. The first report, in what is to become a series of annual reports, has captured the pace at which Earth is heating up.

We are launching an initiative called Indicators of Global Climate Change which brings all the necessary ingredients together to track human-induced warming year by year for the first time. We track emissions of both greenhouse gases and particulate pollution and their warming or cooling influences to determine their role in causing surface temperature change.

We use rigorous methods based on those established in the comprehensive United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessments. IPCC assessments are trusted as a reliable source of information by governments and their climate policy negotiators. Yet, they are published around eight years apart.

In a rapidly changing world where policies can shift quickly, this leaves an information gap: trusted indicators on the state of the climate have been missing from annual UN climate negotiations.

Climate data for all to use

In this first report, we collected evidence on all greenhouse gas emissions and their changes during the pandemic. From this, we built the evidence to quantify the temperature change caused by human activity. This tells us how close the world is to breaching the long-term goal of holding temperatures to within 1.5°C set by the Paris agreement, and how quickly we are approaching it.

In this first report, we explained how much things have changed since the last comprehensive assessment by the IPCC (the sixth assessment report, or AR6) which evaluated data up to 2019.

To evaluate how much of the observed temperature changes are caused by human activity, we needed to track how these activities alter energy flows within the Earth system. Emissions of greenhouse gas accumulate in the atmosphere, trapping heat, while polluting particles, such as sulphate aerosols produced from burning coal, tend to cool the Earth by reflecting more sunlight. In recent years, greenhouse gases have risen strongly but pollution has fallen around the world. Both these trends compound to warm the climate. We assessed that this is causing the highest-ever rate of global warming – over 0.2°C per decade.

In future years, we would like to involve a wider scientific community and especially make it possible to track climate extremes, such as heatwaves, floods and wildfires, like those currently sweeping through Canada. We mark our intention for doing this in this first year by tracking how daily maximum temperatures have increased over land. These are rising twice as fast as the average temperature – and are already 1.74°C above where they were in the 1800s.

We are hoping this data is used by the main users of IPCC information – namely, government climate negotiators – so they understand the scale of action needed. We also want a much wider audience to have access to timely and trustworthy climate data in a fully transparent way, where the scientific methods are documented for the public record, so we are building an open data dashboard that anyone can access to see the data.

We want to build trust in our exercise and so we present this data without advocating for particular policies. We adopt the IPCC mantra of being “policy relevant” but not “policy prescriptive”. We want to let the data speak for itself, giving policymakers the agency to understand the pace of climate change and necessary actions.

As we produce a series of these reports over the coming years, depending on the choices made throughout society, we may track continued high rates of emissions or warming, or a rapid emission decline, with warming levels beginning to stabilise. Whatever happens, the global climate science community will be watching and reporting.

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Piers Forster, Professor of Physical Climate Change; Director of the Priestley International Centre for Climate, University of Leeds

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.