Warmer, Wetter and Windier

Spectator

Bill Gates has almost given up on the idea that we can slow down, much less stop, climate change. He thinks we should pivot our thinking to how best we can deal with the inevitable climate and weather changes headed our way.

He isn’t alone in his pessimism, as homeowners in several states will soon learn.

For example, State Farm insurance will no longer write homeowner insurance policies in California. Existing policies will be honored but not renewed. The ever-present risk of wildfires in ever-expanding parts of the state has created too many claims on too regular a basis, so they have called it quits. Some claim that’s because of California’s poor wildlands management system and failure to mitigate risk by an incompetent Democratic state government.

But California is not alone. Insurers in Texas, Florida, and Louisiana are also pulling back due to increasing natural disasters including flooding. Those states are run by Republicans, proving natural disasters care little about political ideology.

We are still getting warmer, wetter, and windier while the air keeps getting dirtier.

For years we’ve been trying to avoid an average global surface temperature increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrialization averages. (Those averages were taken from 1850-1900. Industrialization actually started prior to that, but good record-keeping did not.) That 1.5 degree tipping point will result in more severe weather events happening faster including flooding, wildfires, and rapid temperature increases, resulting in more storms of greater severity.

According to the World Meteorological Association (WMA), we are already at a 1.4 degree increase, and some scientists now believe the 1.5 threshold is inevitable and will be reached by 2040, sooner in some places.

According to our own National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), globally 2024 was the warmest year on record and the previous decade was also the warmest ever. In the continental U.S., our warmest years have all occurred since 1998, and our hottest were in 2012 and 2016.

(As a side note, yes the planet was warmer about 10,000 years ago after the last Ice Age ended. And warmer still during an interglacial period 125,000 years ago. If you’d like to go back even farther, it was really hot 56 million years ago during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. But those periods of heating occurred over thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of years, not a couple hundred. There has never been so dramatic a temperature increase in so short a time period as is occurring now.)

The potential for severe, negative impacts is very real.

Let’s take sea level rise, as an example. According to UN News, sea levels have risen 9 inches since 1880, which doesn’t sound like much. But just an inch of sea level rise can erode 4 to 9 feet of beach, create more frequent and severe high tide events and storm surge flooding, destroy shoreline ecosystems, and, perhaps most importantly, infiltrate freshwater aquifers depended on for drinking water.

Those rising sea levels have been more than just a theoretical possibility for some. Louisiana’s Isle de Jean Charles, an island home for more than 170 years for indigenous people who escaped the Trail of Tears, has lost a whopping 98 percent of its land mass since 1955, and its people are being relocated to higher ground. Additionally, the coastal village of Shishmaref in Alaska has been relocated, as have the Guna people of Panama and folks in the Solomon Islands, Fiji, and El Bosque, Mexico.

Adding to the slow but inexorable sea level rise is the continued melting and retreat of glaciers around the world. The WMA says five of the last six years have seen the most rapid glacier retreat on record.

It is greenhouse gasses trapping heat in the atmosphere that is first creating, then exacerbating, all the climate change issues. The U.S. actually reduced some greenhouse gas emissions in 2023 and then a bit less in 2024, but the world did not follow suit. The International Energy Agency reports significant emission increases in both China and India helped the world increase greenhouse gas emissions yet again, a reality unchanged every year since the Industrial Revolution with the exception of 2020, when the COVID pandemic shut down much of the global economy and sources of greenhouse gas emissions.

The U.S. previously made strides to move away from CO2 emissions by shuttering coal power plants, offering tax breaks and subsidies for the use of renewable energy, and electric or hybrid vehicles. Unfortunately, the current administration has moved us away from all of that, ordering more drilling and mining and re-firing coal burning power plants while removing any benefits from the use of renewable sources. Our two years of progress reducing greenhouse gasses will likely end.

Our knowledge of the problem is substantial, solutions exist, but the political will is still weak.

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