Hot enough for ya?
The “Heat Dome” has descended upon the Midwest. Welcome to the Terror Dome.
Meanwhile, Southern Florida got flooded last week.
We have only ourselves to blame, really. By ignoring the warnings from scientists. By turning a blind eye to alternative energy sources instead of incentivizing them at scale.
“Given that we’ve seen an unprecedented jump in global warmth over the last 11 months, it is not surprising to see worsening climate extremes so early in the year,” said University of Michigan environment dean Jonathan Overpeck. “If this record pace of warming continues, 2024 will likely be a record year of climate disasters and human suffering.”
From this AP roundup of climate disasters a couple of weeks ago.
And the ones who suffer the most are the poor and elderly.
Help is on the way. It just needs to get here sooner. Here’s an excerpt from the 6/1 post on Bill McKibben’s excellent — and aptly named — Substack called “The Crucial Years”:
But here’s the thing: At the exact same moment—the same string of months—that the planet is beginning to unravel, human beings are finally accelerating the only real response we have: the rapid rollout of sun, wind, and batteries. The rate at which we’re adding renewable energy capacity jumped fifty percent last year. A new report this week found that wind and sun aren’t just growing faster than fossil fuels—they’re growing faster than any electricity source in history.
The rise of wind and solar has been stemming the growth of fossil fuel power, which would have been 22% higher in 2023 without them, Ember says. This would have added around 4bn tonnes of carbon dioxide (GtCO2) to annual global emissions.
Nevertheless, the growth of clean electricity sources needs to accelerate to meet the global goal of tripling renewables by 2030, Ember says.
Meeting this goal would almost halve power sector emissions by the end of the decade, and put the world on a pathway aligned with the 1.5C climate target set in the Paris Agreement.
Even in India, the share of electricity generated by coal dropped below 50 percent for the first time since 1966. There’s every sign that, globally, 2023 saw the peak in global emissions; all those solar panels are not just accounting for growth in energy demand any more, but beginning to cut into the actual consumption of fossil fuels. Now the job is to make the decline so steep that we build enough momentum to begin catching up with the physics of global warming.
It is a terrible story, almost unbearably tragic. But its ending hasn’t been written yet.
The more we harness the sun, the fewer unbearable heat waves we’ll have to endure. The more we lasso the wind, the fewer destructive hurricanes we’ll have to witness.
It’s science… and a chance to salvage the planet.
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