The Climate Catastrophe Is Already Here

From wildfires and floods to record heat, it’s clear we’re at the point of needing to save what we can while we can.

By David Helvarg / The Progressive / July 18, 2023

Since before the release of the first United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change  report in 1990, scientists have been warning that, without global action to quickly reduce carbon dioxide emissions, we could shift from a dangerous to a catastrophic climate situation.

Last summer’s weather made the argument, and this summer has confirmed it—we’ve entered that catastrophic phase. Within a few years we’ll blow through the 1.5 degree Celsius warming of the planet that the world committed to preventing at the 2015 Paris Climate Summit.

The ocean, a natural driver of climate and weather, is heating up faster than even the most sophisticated climate models predicted.

The United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is projecting that half of the world’s oceans could be experiencing “marine heat waves” by September of this year.

From this summer’s wildfires in Canada giving the East Coast and Midwest a taste of the harmful smoke that the West has been experiencing from its own drought driven mega-fires, to heat waves and flooding in China, India and Japan, to heat domes in Texas and Arizona and flooding in Vermont and New York, to incredible 98 degree waters off the Florida Keys (where most corals have already died), to the hottest days ever recorded on the planet (at least in human history) on July 3, 4, and 5, following June, the hottest month in history, the climate signal has become an alarm siren.

But as with the melting of Arctic ice, too many corporations and governments hear this alarm as a dinner bell—an opportunity to drill for oil in newly opened waters or to mine the ocean’s depths.

Civilization, which emerged and grew over the past 10,000 years thanks to the temperate climate conditions that allowed for the development of agriculture, is now threatened in ways never before known. In the last century humanity barely escaped two existential threats, global fascism and nuclear destruction.

Today, while neither of these threats is completely eradicated, the linked threats of climate change and the extinction crisis are far from being adequately addressed. With the human population having exploded from three to eight billion in my lifetime, displacing wildlife at a rate not seen in sixty million years, 96 percent of today’s remaining mammals are either humans or the animals they raise as livestock. And they too are suffering from the heat with a more than 3.5 percent decline in cattle in the United States due to drought in 2022-2023.

What we need today is a global mobilization of resources such as occurred during World War II.

But with one of the two major political parties in the world’s largest economy acting as a fully owned subsidiary of the fossil fuel cartels—along with some Democrats—and much of major U.S. media still reluctant to link extreme weather events to climate change lest they be seen as “partisan,” we have only recently begun to address the climate emergency in a modest fashion.

While I worked for and supported the Biden Administration’s efforts around the Infrastructure Bill and the Inflation Reduction Act—two climate laws that commit an initial $300 billion over the next ten years toward a just energy transition—what we need today is a global mobilization of resources such as occurred during World War II.

At this point in the Anthropocene, we need to start thinking about triage—saving what we can while we can and hoping that the feedback loops long warned about by climate scientists, such as the release of methane from the ocean and thawing permafrost, don’t supercharge planetary heating and mass extinction even if we are able to end fossil fuel usage.

And while today’s insurance costs and death tolls continue to mount (a new study says that 60,000 people died of heat in the European Union last year), I worry that the best present plan for serious climate action is a work of science fiction—Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future. The book outlines a complete transformation of the global economy to a more just and equitable system where eco-restoration becomes humanity’s primary task, a vision that it is up to us to make real.

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