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.

( Foreign Policy in Focus ) – Azerbaijan is making the most of its hosting of the UN climate summit (COP29) in November this year. Its president, Ilham Aliyev, has been on a whirlwind tour of the world to court major nations for a climate finance pact that will feature Baku’s initiative on a New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG), which originally was a pledge to provide $100 billion annually for climate action in developing countries. He also enlisted the support of his neighbor, Russia.

On August 18-19, Russian President Vladimir Putin made a two-day state visit to Azerbaijan. Aliyev invited him to attend COP29. Putin hasn’t been fond of climate summits, but this one will be hard for him to skip. If he attends, he will, for the first time since the invasion of Ukraine, sit next to leaders of P5, G-7, BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), G-20, and the 38-member OECD (Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development) countries. Except for G-7, Russia is a key member of all these groupings.

Putin will be tempted to support the NCQG, since it would give him an opportunity to name and shame those who have been historically the world’s largest emitters of greenhouse gases (GHG). But there is an irony involved here. The Russian economy is awash in resource extraction, especially the extraction of oil and natural gas. Russia is world’s fourth largest emitter of greenhouse gasses, after China, the United States, and India. Should Russia call out rich nations for their historical contribution to GHG emissions, it will be the pot calling the kettle black.

Besides their shared past as former Soviet republics, Azerbaijan and Russia are fellow littoral states that share the long, transnational Caspian coastline. With a surface area of 143,000 square miles, the Caspian is the world’s largest inland body of water. It is “inland” because it doesn’t feed into any larger waterway, such as the ocean. Its year-round cumulative moisture makes coastal economies hum.

As one of the five littoral states—the others being Kazakhstan, Russia, Iran, and Turkmenistan—Azerbaijan is the most dependent upon the Caspian. One-fourth of Baku’s oil reserves are located offshore in the Caspian. Azerbaijan could live without this oil, but it cannot live without the food, water, and ecological treasures that the Caspian lavishes upon it. Sturgeon is the queen fish of the Caspian, which yields the world delicacy of caviar. Up to 90 percent of the world’s caviar is sourced from the Caspian. Baku, the capital city of Azerbaijan and host to COP29, is built on the shore of the Caspian. The lake is the city’s water tower and its food pantry.

But the Caspian is fast drying up. With climate-induced soaring temperatures, the lake is rapidly evaporating, leaving behind sprawling patches of dry land. On average, the Caspian has been receding by 20 centimeters per year. It is projected to drop by 18 meters by the end of the century, while the northern Caspian is already only 5-6 meters deep. It has now passed below the level at which it can support the marine ecosystem.

Aliyev showed Putin rocks that were peeking out of the lake’s fast developing shallows. The Azeri leader fears that this process will eventually turn the lake into an island, just as it did to the Aral Sea. The latter’s seabed is now land surface with miles upon miles of dirt trails. The Kazakh port city of Aqtau has already dried up, leaving the vibrant urban center and its economy in ruin.

Photo by MohammadReza Jelveh on Unsplash

At slightly over a million square miles, Kazakhstan is comparable in size to Western Europe and thus can absorb the loss of a city. Azerbaijan is, however, far more compact with a land area of just 33,436 square miles. Its surface and subsurface territorial waters in the Caspian are twice as large as its landmass. Losing so much of the country to climate change would be unthinkable for any Azeri.

Putin has promised Aliyev to save the lake. Despite his promise, there is little Putin can do. Putin’s Russia is an upstream country on the Caspian. The other four coastal nations, including Azerbaijan, want Moscow to cease impounding and diverting tributaries to the Caspian. One such tributary is the Volga River, which is the longest and the largest (in volume) body of water on the European continent. The Volga’s headwaters are located northwest of Moscow. Caspian nations argue that the Volga makes up 80 percent of the inflow to the lake. The remainder (20 per cent) comes from two downstream river systems: the Kurra and the Aras. The Volga’s uninterrupted flow is, therefore, critical to the life of the Caspian.

But Russia has built 40 dams and diversions on the Volga, and 18 more are in various stages of development, all of which have slashed flow to the Caspian to a trickle. Dams and diversions do diminish inflows, but climate change too is having an impact. If the Caspian itself is evaporating from hotter and drier conditions, the Volga is no exception to this phenomenon either. Reduced precipitation is contributing to the problem. A case in point is the transboundary Helmand River that drains both Afghanistan and Iran. Lack of rainfall has reduced the Helmand’s flow so much that it seldom makes it to Iran, inflaming tensions between Kabul and Tehran.

Ironically, all five Caspian economies – Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Turkmenistan — are heavily dependent on fossil fuel production, which is at the heart of climate breakdown. Despite platitudes about reaching net zero, the global capitalist economy is also hooked on fossil fuels.  As a result, carbon emissions are on the rise, and atmospheric temperatures are smashing records. Since the Paris Climate Pact in 2015, the world has gone backward on climate change.

Unless hydrocarbon resources are kept in the ground, there is little hope of saving world monuments such as the Caspian. COP 29 is a great occasion to showcase what the Caspian means to the region and the rest of the world. Azerbaijan’s initiative on climate finance couldn’t be more urgent to help preserve the Caspian and similar natural wonders. The United States will better serve the cause of climate stability by taking the lead in supporting the NCQG. President Joe Biden could further burnish his climate legacy by giving his vision at COP 29 of the “Great Transition” to a global green economy. Biden and others need to go well beyond the business as usual of climate adaptation to strike at the root of the problem: fossil capitalism.

(The Conversation) – Extreme heat is a silent killer.

From time to time, we hear about shocking cases of football players and other athletes who die suddenly while exerting themselves on hot days. Those deaths are certainly tragic, but statistically they are very rare.

Most deaths from extreme heat are in older people, who frequently die alone inside their homes. They often die slowly, as the heat creeps up to and sometimes past body temperature, especially when heat domes park themselves over cities and keep the temperature high all day and all night. When such deaths happen, they rarely make the news.

Of all the climate change disasters our world is already experiencing, heat is the top killer, as the World Meteorological Organization reported. The planet was more than 1.5 C above the pre-industrial baseline for 12 consecutive months from July 2023 to June 2024. In July this year, we saw the hottest three days ever on record, prompting a special statement from United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

Image by 🌸♡💙♡🌸 Julita 🌸♡💙♡🌸 from Pixabay

Health risks and heat

Our bodies are made to dump excess heat when we are too warm, but that process goes into reverse when the air is warmer than our core temperature. Our other main defence, sweating, doesn’t help when humidity saturates the air, making it impossible for our own moisture to evaporate.

For the frail and elderly, who are more likely to be labouring with heart troubles, COPD or other challenges, simply sitting still in a heat wave requires an effort equivalent to walking on a treadmill. The effort is not great, but it is steady and relentless. It exhausts the body, sometimes to the point of no return.

Tracking heat-related deaths is challenging, and it’s changing as authorities become more aware of heat as a contributing or underlying factor to deaths by other causes. A paper published by the American Journal of Public Health points out that the 1995 heat wave in Chicago likely contributed to hundreds more deaths than had first been attributed to heat itself.

Who is at risk?

Many people lack air conditioning or a way to get to a place that has it, such as a library, recreation centre or shopping mall. As a result, too many people in cities are forced to endure long waves of heat — waves that are occurring more frequently, lasting longer, and reaching higher temperatures — in a trend that appears set to continue getting worse.

Air conditioning, once a luxury that drew people to summertime movie theatres on hot nights, has become a necessity. Increasingly, it is also a legal requirement, as cities pass bylaws requiring landlords not to allow the temperature in their tenants’ quarters to rise above a certain level. Toronto has such a bylaw for rental units that have air conditioning available, capping indoor temps at 26 C between June 2 and Sept. 14.

“Global Heating 2200,” by Juan Cole, Digital, Dream / Dreamworld v. 3, 2024.

Such laws recognize the vulnerability of tenants who lack control over the temperature in their rental units, making heat death an especially urban tragedy, as confirmed in a recent Statistics Canada study between 2000 and 2020. Deaths from extreme heat were more likely in cities with a higher percentage of renter households.

During a single week-long heat wave in June 2021 — the year after the period captured in the Statistics Canada study — B.C.’s chief coroner found that 570 people died from heat-related causes — 79 per cent of them were seniors.

Taking action at the community level

From this Global North perspective, the community members who are most likely to die from extreme heat included:

• Those over 65
• Those with more than one chronic condition (including hypertension, mental health, diabetes, heart disease, lung disease)
• Socially disadvantaged populations in our communities
• Those with mobility issues
• Those experiencing social isolation (living alone)
• Tenants with lack of air conditioning
• Those living in an urban heat island

This problem is not going away.

Some of the actions we can take to protect our most vulnerable community members include:

• Increase awareness that excessive heat is not merely uncomfortable, but dangerous.
• Make sure people are warned about impending heat waves.
• Advocate for everyone to have access to air conditioning.
• Check on and support people who live alone, especially those with no air conditioning.
• Invite people over if you have air conditioning, or help them get to community cooling stations.
• Help vulnerable people who do not have air conditioning to improvise, by freezing wet cloths, for example, to take out and hang around their necks. Doing this, especially with a fan blowing, can be surprisingly effective.
• Learn and share the warning signs of heat-related illness.
• Make sure they drink plenty of water and other replenishing fluids.

While we must do our best to limit climate change to keep our planet from getting ever hotter, we must also make every effort to protect the vulnerable from the impacts of the heat that is already here.

Myles David Sergeant, Assistant Clinical Professor, Department of Family Medicine, McMaster University

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

A 13-month streak of record-breaking global warmth has ended.

From June 2023 until June 2024, air and ocean surface water temperatures averaged a quarter of a degree Celsius higher than records set only a few years previously. Air temperatures in July 2024 were slightly cooler than the previous July (0.04°C, the narrowest of margins) according to the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.

July 2023 was in turn 0.28°C warmer than the previous record-hot July in 2019, so the remarkable jump in temperature during the past year has yet to ease off completely. The warmest global air temperature recorded was in December 2023, at 1.78°C above the pre-industrial average temperature for December – and 0.31°C warmer than the previous record.

Global warming has consistently toppled records for warm global average temperatures in recent decades, but breaking them by as much as a quarter of a degree for several months is not common. The end of this streak does not diminish the mounting threat of climate change.

So what caused these record temperatures? Several factors came together, but the biggest and most important is climate change, largely caused by burning fossil fuels.

What caused the heat streak

Temperatures typical of Earth 150 years ago are used for comparison to measure modern global warming. The reference period, 1850–1900, was before most greenhouse gases associated with global industrialisation – which increase the heat present in Earth’s ocean and atmosphere – had been emitted.

July 2024 was 1.48°C warmer than a typical pre-industrial July, of which about 1.3°C is attributable to the general trend of global warming over the intervening decades. This trend will continue to raise temperatures until humanity stabilises the climate by keeping fossil fuels in the ground where they belong.

But global warming doesn’t happen in a smooth progression. Like UK house prices, the general trend is up, but there are ups and downs along the way.

Behind much of the ups and downs is the El Niño phenomenon. An El Niño event is a reorganisation of the water across the vast reaches of the Pacific Ocean. El Niño is so important to the workings of worldwide weather as it increases the temperature of the air on average across all of Earth’s surface, not only over the Pacific. Between El Niño events, conditions may be neutral or in an opposite state called La Niña that tends to cool global temperatures. The oscillation between these extremes is irregular, and El Niño conditions tend to recur after three to seven years.

The warm El Niño phase of this cycle began to kick in a year ago, reached its peak around the end of 2023 and is now trending neutral, which is why the record-breaking streak has ended.

The 2023/2024 El Niño was strong, but it wasn’t super-strong. It doesn’t fully explain the remarkable degree to which the past year broke temperature records. The exact influence of other factors has yet to be fully untangled.

We know there is a small positive contribution from the Sun, which is in a phase of its 11-year sunspot cycle in which it radiates fractionally more energy to the Earth.

Methane (also a byproduct of the fossil fuel industry, alongside cattle and wetlands) is another important greenhouse gas and its concentration in the air has risen more rapidly in the past decade than over the previous decade.

Scientists are also assessing how much measures to clean up air pollution might be adding to warming, since certain particulate air pollutants can reflect sunlight and influence the formation of clouds.

A temperature ratchet

Across the global ocean, 2023 was a devastating summer for coral reefs and surrounding ecosystems in the Caribbean and beyond. This was followed by heavy bleaching across the Great Barrier Reef off Australia during the southern hemisphere summer. While it is El Niño years that tend to see mass mortality events on reefs around the world, it is the underlying climate change trend that is the long-term threat, as corals are struggling to adapt to rising temperature extremes.

As the Pacific Ocean is now likely to revert towards La Niña conditions, global temperatures will continue to ease back, but probably not to the levels seen prior to 2023/24.

El Niño acts a bit like a ratchet on global warming. A big El Niño event breaks new records and establishes a new, higher norm for global temperatures. That new normal reflects the underlying global warming trend.

A plausible scenario is that global temperatures will fluctuate near the 1.4°C level for several years, until the next big El Niño event pushes the world above 1.5°C of warming, perhaps in the early 2030s.

The Paris agreement on climate change committed the world to make every effort to limit global warming to 1.5°C, because the impacts of climate change are expected to accelerate beyond that level.

The good news is that the shift away from fossil fuels has started in sectors such as electricity generation, where renewable energy meets a growing share of rising demand. But the transition is not happening fast enough, by a large margin. Meeting climate targets is not compatible with fully exploiting existing fossil-fuel infrastructure, yet new investment in oil rigs and gas fields continues.

Headlines about record breaking global temperatures will probably return. But they need not do so forever. There are many options for accelerating the transition to a decarbonised economy, and it is increasingly urgent that these are pursued.

Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?

Get our award-winning weekly roundup in your inbox instead. Every Wednesday, The Conversation’s environment editor writes Imagine, a short email that goes a little deeper into just one climate issue. Join the 35,000+ readers who’ve subscribed so far.

Christopher Merchant, Professor of Ocean and Earth Observation, University of Reading

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

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

PBS News Weekly: Climate change and raging wildfires

However, that’s begun to change. As it happens, like so many other New Yorkers, I only recently experienced a June heat dome over my city. Here in Manhattan, where I walk many miles daily for exercise, it was simply brutal. The sort of thing you might expect in a truly bad week in August.

This June, though, it was hot nationally almost beyond imagining. As I began this piece, it was estimated that more than 270 million Americans, 80% of us, were experiencing a heatwave of a potentially unprecedented sort extending over significant parts of the country. There were devastating early wildfires in the Southwest and West (not to speak of the ones burning long-term in Canada). Ruidoso, a small mountain town in New Mexico that my wife, who grew up in El Paso, Texas, once loved, had at least 1,400 of its structures damaged or destroyed by fire and two people killed.

Meanwhile, as I began writing this, the first tropical storm of this overheated season was already forming in the Gulf of Mexico and heading for Texas, not to speak of those record rainstorms that only recently flooded the Ft. Lauderdale and Miami areas in a distinctly unsettling fashion. And then, of course, there was the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s prediction that, given how hot the tropical waters of the Atlantic Ocean had become, this year’s hurricane season could prove to be an all-too-literal hell on Earth. There might possibly be 25 named storms (itself a record prediction). And I was thinking about all of this as I sat at my desk in New York City, stripped to my undershirt in the rising heat of a June day from hell. 

Honestly, it’s not that complicated. In fact, we should give ourselves credit. We humans have certainly proved to be remarkable — or at least remarkably destructive. Yes, we’ve long been that way, but the levels of that destructiveness have, in recent history, grown in a striking fashion. If you feel in a negative enough mood, humanity’s time on this planet can be seen as a history of ever more horrific wars that, in the last century, became global. And, of course, the second of those world wars ended in an historically unprecedented fashion with the destruction of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by a new weapon, the atom bomb, that all too soon proved capable not just of devastating urban areas but of possibly wiping out civilization itself. And that, in a sense, couldn’t be more deeply us. (There are, of course, other histories that could also be written that would be far more encouraging, including a history of literature and of healing, but at least for now let’s leave them aside.)

I mean, give us full credit. In these decades, we’ve discovered — once by the deepest sort of planning and experimentation (think “Trinity,” the code name for the first nuclear test in the desert of Los Alamos, New Mexico, that Robert J. Oppenheimer became so famous for) and then by the inadvertent, if deeply profitable use of fossil fuels — two ways of potentially destroying Earth, at least as a livable place for you-know-who. I’m talking, of course, about the very planet that nurtured humanity for endless millennia.

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Nuclear war between great (or even lesser) powers could, of course, quickly produce an apocalyptic scenario that might kill millions of human beings and create a nuclear winter on planet Earth capable of starving most of the rest of us. Climate change, while potentially no less destructive, offers us that apocalypse in slow motion. And that’s obviously why it’s taken me so long, despite all that I’ve written on the subject, to truly feel it myself in broiling Manhattan.

Death by Heat

Oh, and as I sat there sweating profusely in front of my computer on that overheated day, I was struck by a little cheery news when it comes to doing in the planet. As the Guardian recently reported, nuclear spending actually rose globally by 13% in 2023. How farsighted of us!

Congratulations are certainly in order, don’t you think? And to give credit where it’s due, among the nine nuclear powers on this planet, my own country leads the list in increased spending, pouring more billions of dollars into such weaponry than the next eight nuclear powers combined. And mind you, at this very second, two of the planet’s nine nuclear powers, Russia and Israel, are actually at war. While one, Israel, doesn’t mention its nuclear arsenal, the other has repeatedly threatened to use “tactical” nuclear weapons (some more powerful than the ones that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki) in Ukraine or even assumedly elsewhere in Europe.

A third nuclear power, North Korea, has been implicitly threatening to atomize its southern neighbor and foe. Oh, and just for a little even cheerier news, Russian President Vladimir Putin now needs North Korean weaponry so badly to fight his war in Ukraine that he may be willing to aid Kim Jong-un’s scientists in designing “a warhead that could survive re-entry into the atmosphere and threaten its many adversaries, starting with the United States.” So, at the moment, if anything, the possibilities of future nuclear war seem to be on the rise.

Meanwhile, in this planet’s slow-motion version of Armageddon, while we Americans have been experiencing our own extreme weather events from coast to coast, so have other countries, sometimes in an even more devastating fashion. Take Greece, part of a Europe that experienced extreme heat last summer. Only recently, it’s had an early heatwave that scientists say could “go down in history” (at least until next year!) in which at least five tourists have died. And that, in truth, was nothing, not if you shift your focus to Saudi Arabia. There, during this year’s Hajj religious pilgrimage in which 1.8 million well-robed visitors took part, more than 1,300 pilgrims died of heat exposure as the temperature hit 125 degrees Fahrenheit. Meanwhile, South Asia has been broiling, with temperatures there all too literally going sky high — up to 127 degrees Fahrenheit in India and Pakistan — and resulting in increasing numbers of deaths. In India, only perhaps 12% of the population even has air conditioning (which, in any case, simply puts more fossil fuels into the atmosphere). Scores of people have died there from extreme temperatures, including dozens of poll workers during India’s recent election.

Such extremes are becoming a global phenomenon, as is ever wilder weather. Take, for instance, recent record temperatures and a grim drought across significant parts of northern China along with record flooding in the southern part of that country. And mind you, China has done more than any other nation to switch to non-fossil-fuel-producing renewable forms of energy and yet, in 2023, it was also continuing to build new coal-powered plants at a rate of two per week.

Whether cheaper solar and wind energy, which are indeed growing faster than any energy source ever, will leave oil, coal, and natural gas in a historic ditch remains to be seen. In the meantime, our planet is a growing climate mess, with (let’s not forget) us humans continuing to make war on each other in Ukraine and Gaza, efforts that only pour yet more fossil fuels into the atmosphere.   

A Slow-Motion Conflagration

This is just the start of a process of climate devastation that, barring surprises, is scheduled to grow ever more severe in the years to come. And if you want to look for a moment at causation (as with nuclear spending), rather than the death-dealing results of it all, consider my country. It’s still setting startling records when it comes to the production of fossil fuels. In fact, in 2023, for the sixth year in a row, the United States set a global record for oil production (an average of 12.9 million barrels a day) and it’s also now the largest exporter of natural gas on the planet.

Meanwhile, the major fossil-fuel companies and their CEOs continue to make absolute fortunes. As the CEO of Chevron put it last year: “In 2023, we returned more cash to shareholders and produced more oil and natural gas than any year in the company’s history.” Hooray! And think of all of that as possibly the ultimate form of warfare on planet Earth. Consider it, in fact, a slo-mo version of atomic war, even if no one normally talks about fossil-fuelized war or anything of the sort.

Those mind-boggling American records took place under a president who has at least attempted to curb climate change. And yet, keep in mind that my fellow citizens, sweating across the country right now, could elect a man in 2024 who has sworn to wipe out our modest steps towards a greener future on the very first day he gets back into the Oval Office (and essentially ignored a question about climate change during the debate Thursday without being seriously challenged for doing so). He’s proudly met with just about every fossil fuel CEO in sight, promising to “end a freeze on permits for new liquefied natural gas,” reverse any steps President Biden took to limit fossil-fuel usage, and is even more proudly ready, as he’s bragged more than once, to “drill, baby, drill” from his first day in office. Meanwhile, of course, many of the countries of Europe, which until now have moved more decisively against the use of fossil fuels, just elected all too many far-right representatives to the European Parliament and may do the same thing in state-by-state elections, and so, as in this country, could reverse course on climate change.

Imagine this then: next June, if I’m still writing TomDispatch pieces, it may be without even that undershirt on. (Excuse me for a moment, while I wipe the sweat from my face.)

The future, as they say, is now and, believe me, I feel it. Right now! (And I don’t often use exclamation points.) And yet, in the slow-motion apocalypse that climate change represents, the one that’s already starting to slaughter human beings before it even truly hits its stride, this is clearly just the beginning, perhaps — though we don’t yet know — just the beginning of the beginning.

It saddens me beyond words to imagine the future world my grandchildren might find themselves in. It’s true that we should never underestimate ourselves — and not just when it comes to destruction. The switch to non-fossil-fuel forms of energy is distinctly on the rise and they are indeed becoming ever less expensive to install and use. And you never know — you truly don’t — what else the human brain can come up with. Nor, of course, do we know whether, in the grimmest fashion imaginable, we could end all this slow-motion suffering on planet Earth in a nuclear conflagration.

Given our history, who knows what we could do? And I haven’t even mentioned artificial intelligence, have I? I fear I may simply be too old to take all of this in or the ways in which we humans could still prove destructive beyond compare.

Copyright 2024 Tom Engelhardt

Via Tomdispatch.com

Eyewitnesses said that not all the dead were elderly, that young persons died, as well.

Pilgrims carry out a series of rituals during the pilgrimage, beginning with preparing themselves and establishing their pious intention. Many of the steps involve being outside and being active. They dress in white robes. They circumambulate the cube-shaped Kaaba shrine. They run between the nearby hillocks of Safa and Marwa seven times, in commemoration of the search of Abraham’s wife Hajar for water for her son with the patriarch, Ishmael. They walk or are taken in buses to Mina and spend some nights of the pilgrimage there. There, they throw stones at satan.

H/t Saudi Ministry of Hajj

AFP explains that some pilgrims try to avoid paying the hefty visa fees by just showing up unregistered. They however, then lack access to air conditioned facilities and are at special risk of heat stroke.

The number of heat stroke deaths seems to have doubled since last year. Saudi Arabia is one of the world’s major oil producers, and burning petroleum to power vehicles puts the deadly heat-trapping gas, carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere, heating up the planet.

The G20 Climate Risk Atlas writes, “The science shows that Saudi Arabia will experience devastating climate impacts if it follows a high-emissions pathway. Without urgent action, Saudi Arabia will see an 88% increase in the frequency of agricultural drought by 2050. Heatwaves will last more than 4,242% longer and the combination of sea level rise, coastal erosion and fiercer weather will cause chaos for Saudi Arabia’s economy, which stands to lose around 12.2% of GDP by 2050.”

A 12.2% loss of gross domestic product for Saudi Arabia today would amount to a loss of $135 billion annually. That loss alone is more than the entire yearly GDP of Kenya or Ecuador.

Flooding on the kingdom’s coasts as the sea level rises threatens 210,000 of the 22 million citizens. Long droughts endanger fisheries, forests and agriculture, which make up 2.6% of the country’s gross domestic product. Longer heat waves will reduce the quality of life and menace livelihoods and health.

I have to tell you, I have lived in the Arabian Peninsula. I remember one June evening my wife and I were ready to take a short walk over to a restaurant when it was 114° F., and we went out and were met with a blast furnace. We went back in and ordered an air conditioned car for the two-minute drive. We just couldn’t bear to walk five minutes in it.

The Saudi government sees hosting the annual Hajj or pilgrimage as a form of soft power that adds to its legitimacy throughout the Muslim world, comprising some 2 billion persons. If its oil-intensive policies increasingly contribute to disabilities for pilgrims on Hajj, in turn, that development can only harm the monarchy’s reputation, since it styled itself “Servant of the two holy shrines.”

AFP Video: “Hajj pilgrimage ends amid deadly Saudi heat spike | AFP

( Tomdispatch.com ) – While April and May are usually the hottest months in many countries in Southeast Asia, hundreds of millions of people are now suffering in South Asia from an exceptionally intense heat wave that has killed hundreds. One expert has already called it the most extreme heat event in history. Record-breaking temperatures above 122º F were reported in the Indian capital of New Delhi and temperatures sizzled to an unheard of 127º F  in parts of India and Pakistan.

Nor was the blazing heat limited to Asia. Heat waves of exceptional severity and duration are now occurring simultaneously in many areas of the world. Mexico and parts of the United States, notably Miami and Phoenix, have recently been in the grip of intense heat events. In southern Mexico, endangered howler monkeys in several states have been falling dead from trees in their tropical forests due to heat stroke and dehydration. Below-average rainfall throughout Mexico has led to water shortages in Mexico City and elsewhere. In some places, birds and bats, not to speak of humans, are also dying from the heat.

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All of this is no coincidence. The hot and heavy hand of climate change is now upon us. Last year was the hottest on Earth in 125,000 years, and the concentration of heat-trapping carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the atmosphere was the highest in four million years and still climbing at an ever-increasing rate. Meanwhile, global sea surface temperatures also reached a peak, causing severe massive coral bleaching in all three major ocean basins. 

The World Bank is projecting that, by 2050, there will be more than 200 million climate refugees, 20 times the 10 million refugees that have already destabilized Europe. Climate change is also putting an increasingly heavy burden on our social safety net, which could ultimately cause social order to begin to break down, generating chaos.

Nobel Prize-winning former Energy Secretary Steven Chu now claims it’s no longer possible to keep the global temperature from rising more than 1.5°C above the historical average, as the 195-nation signatories to the 2015 Paris climate agreement had hoped. In fact, he projects that the target of 2°C will also be broken and that, by 2050 the global temperature will have risen above 3°C. Nor is his pessimism unique. Hundreds of other scientists have recently forecast a strong possibility of hitting 2.5°C, which should hardly be surprising since, for well over 30 years now, global leaders have failed to heed the warnings of climate scientists by moving decisively to phase out fossil fuels and their heat-trapping gases.

What to make of such dire forecasts?

It could hardly be clearer that the world is already in the throes of a climate catastrophe. That means it’s high time for the U.S. to declare a national climate emergency to help focus us all on the disaster at hand. (Or as famed English poet Samuel Johnson put it centuries ago, “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”)

Such a declaration of a climate emergency is long overdue. Some 40 other nations have already done so, including 2,356 jurisdictions and local governments representing more than a billion people. Of course, a declaration alone will hardly be enough. As the world’s wealthiest and most powerful nation, and the one that historically has contributed the most legacy greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, the U.S. needs to develop a coherent exit strategy from the stranglehold of fossil fuels, a strategy that could serve as an international example of a swift and thorough clean-energy transition. But at the moment, of course, this country remains the world’s largest producer and consumer of oil and natural gas and the third largest producer of coal — and should Donald Trump win in November, you can kiss any possible reductions in those figures goodbye for the foreseeable future. Sadly enough, however, though the Biden administration’s rhetoric of climate concern has been strong, in practice, this country has continued to cede true climate leadership to others.

Despite the laudable examples of smaller nations like Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Paraguay, and Costa Rica that are already at, or within a percentage point or two, of being 100% powered by clean, renewable energy, the world sorely needs the U.S. as a global role model. To make a rapid, far-reaching, and unrelenting break with our fossil-fuel dependency — 79% of the nation’s energy is now drawn from fossil fuels — a national mobilization would be needed, and it would have to be a genuine all-of-society effort.

National Mobilization Amid Crisis

Fortunately, there is a historical precedent for just such a comprehensive mobilization of government and citizenry in dire circumstances: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s and the World War II years provide examples of the scale and intensity of the response needed today to reverse climate change. However, instead of gearing up to produce jobs for the unemployed or planes and tanks for a war, a concerted nationwide industrial effort is needed now to upgrade our electrical grid and produce millions of solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, carbon-capture machines, and zero-emission vehicles. All too sadly, this country and the world are now in a situation even more perilous than either the Great Depression or World War II.

Rising seas pose serious threats to major American cities, including Boston, Charleston, Miami, and New York, while, in recent years, millions of acres of the Midwest have been flooded by climate-related extreme weather events. Had a foreign enemy inflicted the kind of damage caused by such floods, or the firestorms that swept California and the Pacific Northwest in 2020, or the hurricanes and droughts the nation has begun experiencing with increased frequency, the U.S. would have immediately mobilized for war. Now, this country needs to do exactly that to face the climate crisis, but (even forgetting the horrifying possibility that Donald Trump could win the coming presidential election and sink any possibility of moving on climate change nationally for years to come) how to get our act together?

As French author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote in his classic 1943 novella, Le Petit Prince,  “A goal without a plan is just a wish.” In other words, a national climate action plan is urgently needed.

In the Trump years of climate-science denial, any progress in controlling emissions resulted from actions by states, cities, and businesses or institutions. Over the long term, however, climate policy is far too important to be left to a hodgepodge of laws and policies haphazardly applied across some of our 50 states and thousands of cities and businesses. What this country needs is a plan guided by scientific and technical analysis and based on an ambitious but attainable set of greenhouse-gas-reduction quotas. Its point would not be to override the climate agendas of any city, state, or group, or the aspirations of the Green New Deal (House Resolution HR 109). It would simply be to provide a reliable toolkit of measures and policies along with analyses of their costs and benefits — a compass for getting to negative carbon emission as quickly and cost-effectively as possible.

This country today has no comprehensive climate action plan that proposes clear, enforceable targets, timelines, and roadmaps for climate protection and restabilization — and it desperately needs one. Call it America’s Energy Transition: Achieving a Clean Energy Future and imagine that it would build on previous authoritative studies, analyzing renewable-energy-generating and distribution technologies in terms of their costs, commercial readiness, resource constraints, and potential efficiency. It would formulate and model competing scenarios with clusters of complementary technologies, each requiring different policies for its implementation.

From such an exercise, Americans would learn how to achieve the greatest greenhouse gas reductions with the most speed and cost-effectiveness, as well as the fewest unwanted impacts, while best meeting this country’s ongoing energy needs. Such a study would also reveal the demands on natural resources of each scenario along with its costs and the manufacturing capacity required.

To build trust and engagement in the final plan, regional advisory councils made up of scientists, engineers, businesspeople, and major stakeholder representatives should be created to offer recommendations on how best to adapt such a plan to conditions in each part of the country. The final policy roadmap would then be designated as the “optimal energy path scenario” for the nation and provided to Congress, so that it could use the findings as a basis for funding and implementing new climate legislation.

Without Political Action, Don’t Hold Your Breath for a Bold Climate Plan

Left to its own devices, without strong public pressure, Congress might basically ignore or fail to enact legislation to implement the results of a National Climate Action Plan, especially if Congress were still controlled by the fossil-fuel-loving Republican Party. A Republican stranglehold on Congress and/or the White House would undoubtedly stymie both the creation of a national climate plan and the implementation of its findings, as well as the clean-energy transition it would facilitate.

To prevent such a setback from occurring, a strong popular constituency must be built nationwide capable of exerting powerful pressure on Congress to ensure the creation of a climate plan and the appropriate legislation to make it functional.  Otherwise, no matter how sound the PR campaign on its behalf, serious political obstacles would stand in the way of its adoption, even by a Democratic Congress.

Through its lobbying, think tanks, public relations arms, and advertising, the politically and economically powerful fossil-fuel industry has, for decades, blocked meaningful climate legislation in both Democratic and Republican congresses. The creation of a powerful, broad coalition of constituencies — environmental, labor, public health, faith-based, and even progressive elements of the business community — could serve as a popular countervailing force against the mighty fossil-fuel industry. But as a first step, that coalition would need support, guidance, and a common accepted platform both to stand behind and to mobilize the public. The American environmental community could produce that platform. Yet this would not be a simple matter, due to the way that community is siloed, with each major organization catering to its own constituency, interests, and funders.

To create a common consensual vision around which the national climate movement could mobilize, a broad civil society gathering should be convened to attract the leadership of all environmental and climate action groups and set the stage for the National Climate Action Plan. That gathering would, of course, focus on the roadblocks to implementing such a plan and to a swift, national clean-energy transition — and how those roadblocks could be dismantled.

Put all of this together and you would have a nation mobilized against the fossil-fuel industry, ready to create a climate action plan and mobilize Americans in an all-of-society effort on behalf of slashing national carbon emissions in a radical fashion, accelerating a clean-energy transition, and protecting our endangered world.  What more could you ask for?

Copyright 2024 John J. Berger

Via Tomdispatch.com

The National Atmospheric and Oceanic Agency has announced that May 2024 was the hottest May on record. But even more worrisome, it was the 14th consecutive hottest month on record.

Records began being kept around 1850, when enough people around the world began noting down temperatures using a mercury thermometer. In fact, scientific proxies for temperatures before that date suggest we are now seeing averages that are the hottest in 125,000 years.

That is worrisome since all human civilization developed under cooler conditions during which the parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere tended to be around 280. By pumping billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere annually, our industrial civilization has raised that average to 426 ppm.

That concentration of CO2 was typical of the Middle Pliocene, roughly 3 million years ago, when it was hotter in much of the earth and seas were somewhat higher. See Michael E. Mann’s magisterial Our Fragile Moment, which I discussed with him here.

While the average of earth temperatures was higher in May than ever before recorded, some places got hit worse than others. India and Pakistan saw unbearable heat waves. New Delhi, India’s capital, may have hit 49 degrees C. (122F.), and a glitch in the records caused a panic when it was misread as 52° C. (125.6° F.). Still, 48°C or 49°C was plenty hot enough to cause heat stroke and kill off dozens of people. Mexico likewise had a massive heat wave that killed some people. And Africa was deadly hot, with hot waters off Tanzania contributing to a typhoon that caused flash floods. In fact there were 5 named typhoons, an above-average number. And arctic sea ice was low, though not the lowest it has been.

NOAA’s infographic explains:

The past 14 months have been so hot because an El Nino has been layered over climbing temperatures because of climate change. In El Nina years strong trade winds blow from Indonesia where the water is colder east to the coast of Latin America, bringing up colder water even in the usually warmer east, which has a cooling effect. In El Nino years those trade winds are weakened and warm water off the Latin American Coast creates a pressure system that has a heating effect.

But even with a hotter El Nino year, the records wouldn’t have been broken on this scale. El Ninos break out every few years– it is a cycle and we’ve seen them before. But we haven’t seen these temperatures before. They haven’t been seen since our ancestors were making bone tools in Morocco 120,000 years ago.

Although some pundits have said the earth has already exceeded the 1.5° C. (2.7°F) of extra warming above pre-industrial levels that the Paris Climate accord of 2015 pledged to avoid, this is not true. There is a difference between occasional spikes of global temperature and reaching a new average plateau. At current rates of burning fossil fuels we won’t race past the 1.5° C. limit as a global average temperature increase until about 2033. Scientists worry that breaching this limit will throw the global climate system into chaos that will pose challenges to keeping civilization going.

At the moment, Professor Mann says we have reduced the rate of increase in emissions so much that we are no longer headed for a 4° C. increase but rather toward a 3° C. increase. That is still way too much. We need to spend the next ten years significantly cutting back on our use of fossil fuels by switching to wind, solar, water and battery for electricity and to electric vehicles for transportation. The smaller the final temperature increase, the fewer catastrophes our children and grandchildren will have to deal with. Plus, moving to green energy quickly will save you money.

My parents said the planet is getting too hot for people to live here. They called it climate change. What does that mean? – Joseph, age 12, Boise, Idaho

Many countries have seen extremely hot weather lately, but in most of the inhabited world, it’s never going to get “too hot for people to live here,” especially in relatively dry climates.

When it’s hot outside in dry places, most of the time our bodies can cool off by evaporating water and heat from our skin as sweat.

However, there are places where it occasionally gets dangerously hot and humid, especially where hot deserts are right next to the warm ocean. When the air is humid, sweat doesn’t evaporate as quickly, so sweating doesn’t cool us the way it does in drier environments.

In parts of the Middle East, Pakistan and India, summer heat waves can combine with humid air that blows in off the sea, and this combination can be truly deadly. Hundreds of millions of people live in those regions, most without access to indoor air conditioning.

Image by Sasin Tipchai from Pixabay

Scientists like me use a “wet bulb thermometer” to get a better sense of this risk. A wet bulb thermometer allows water to evaporate by blowing ambient air over a damp cloth. If the wet bulb temperature is over 95 F (35 C), and even at lower levels, the human body won’t be able to let enough heat out. Prolonged exposure to such combined heat and humidity can be fatal.

During a severe heat wave in 2023, wet bulb temperatures were very high over the lower Mississippi Valley, though they didn’t reach fatal levels. In Delhi, India, where air temperatures were over 120 degree Fahrenheit (49 Celsius) for several days in May 2024, the wet bulb temperatures came close, and several people died from suspected heatstroke in the hot and humid weather. In conditions like that, everyone has to take precautions.

Is it climate change?

When people burn carbon – whether it’s coal in a power plant or gasoline in a vehicle – it creates carbon dioxide (CO₂). This invisible gas builds up in the atmosphere and traps the Sun’s warmth near the Earth’s surface.

The result is what we mean by “climate change.”

Every bit of coal, oil or gas that ever gets burned adds a little bit more to the temperature. As temperatures rise, dangerously hot and humid weather has begun to spread to more places.

Areas of the U.S. Gulf Coast in Louisiana and Texas are increasingly at risk of dangerous hot and humid conditions in summer, as are heavily irrigated areas of the desert Southwest where water sprayed over farm fields adds moisture to the atmosphere.

Climate change causes a lot more problems than just hot, sweaty weather.

Hot air evaporates a lot more water, so crops, forests and landscapes in some areas dry out, which makes them more susceptible to wildfire. Each Celsius degree of warming can cause a sixfold increase in wildfire over parts of the western U.S.

Warming also makes ocean water expand, which can flood coastal regions. Rising sea levels threaten to displace as many as 2 billion people by 2100.

All of these impacts mean that climate change threatens the global economy. Continuing to burn coal, oil and gas could cut global incomes by about 25% by the end of the century, according to one estimate.

Good news and bad news

There’s both bad news and good news about climate change in the future.

The bad news is that as long as we keep burning carbon, it will continue to get hotter and hotter.

The good news is that we can substitute clean energy, like solar and wind power, instead of burning carbon, to power the products and services of modern life.

There’s been tremendous progress in the past 15 years in making clean energy reliable and affordable, and almost every country on Earth has now agreed to stop climate change before too much damage is done.

Just as our ancestors built better lives by switching from outhouses to indoor plumbing, we will avoid making our world unlivable by switching from coal, oil and gas to clean energy.

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Scott Denning, Professor of Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University

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