DO LOOK UP!

Why does it so often get so cold if there is Global Warming? The movie “Don’t Look Up” is getting all this attention as a parody of the climate crisis, yet it doesn’t mention that in the movie. Why? The Politics of the USA is divided as people take opposing sides on the Build Back Better plan, is there science that says one side is better than another? … These are some of the questions I post about on Facebook, but have avoided bringing to this website. That is a disservice to the future leaders and their preparation needed to reduce the consequences.

To the first question about why weather is often so intense, weird, and sometimes intensely cold? It is a consequence of destabilizing the long term heat energy balances of the planet. Though heat gets trapped due to increases of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, it gets stored in the waters of the ocean; and those waters move around, mixing the heat as the wind and currents move it.

The feature image shows what is happening to the jet stream. At times it is quite chaotic, but even when a pattern emerges, it often has deep troughs and high ridges bringing Arctic air down to the US Gulf Coast or the Mediterranean, while simultaneously having warm air flowing over Alaska and Finland.

This second image shows the air patterns that enable and empower the Jet stream. Hot air rises, and it sinks as it cools.

The average pattern shows air rising over the equator and falling about 30º north and south of there. The prevailing trade winds flow out of the east for the tropics flowing in to replace the rising air. The pressure of the sinking air over the temperate regions results in surface winds that are out of the west. There is one more upper atmospheric air pattern that separates the temperate and polar air patterns. The jet stream is the consequence of the air rising or falling in the region between those three air patterns. The greater the temperature difference between the Polar Regions and the Equator, the faster (more powerfully) the jet stream winds move. Conversely, the more polar regions warm relative to the equator, the weaker the jet stream. As explained in the post as to methane, the Arctic is warming faster than other regions due to greenhouse gases. (Water vapor is a powerful greenhouse gas, but unlike CO2, methane, nitrous oxides and other GHG it is self-limiting by precipitation as rain, snow and hail.) The Arctic warming weakens the temperature differential responsible for global wind patterns.

How Much Heat Imbalance?

This next image is from a new paper that systematically converted the thousands of ocean temperature readings gathered globally and expressed it in terms of heat energy. A review of this paper in the Guardian helps us to Look Up and considers the enormous amount of energy absorbed, an imbalance created by the insulating effect of greenhouse gases,

and upsetting the ocean and air currents – not unlike heating water in a pot causes rippling convection currents into what had been a stable system. That is the heat that is creating chaos in the jet stream, creating polar vortexes and heat domes in the air over cities.
I recently met a 40yr old English teacher who had studied some environmental science. Our conversation wandered to climate. He commented that climate warnings had been going on since he was a boy, yet we are still here. That was his reason for ignoring the warnings. I tried briefly, but sadly wasn’t getting through to him as to the increased urgency of more recent warnings.

Many past warnings have been quite accurate. What he needed to grasp is that the difficulty of pulling away from the brink keeps getting harder. Also, some tipping points have been passed in the decades our political leaders delayed substantive action due to political resistance. [Just a reminder as to why our nation, all nations, need the quality, problem solving, people unifying leaders that this school program promotes.] From the IPCC’s data as to what level of reduction would be needed, this image shows how the task of avoiding catastrophic climate consequences gets harder as society delays taking action.

The polar jet stream of the Holocene had enough power (due to enough temperature differential between polar and temperate latitude temperatures) to rarely see the wobbles and loops that now allow warm tropical air to flow into the Arctic or allow deep diversions of cold Arctic air down over temperate land masses. A chaotic jet stream means chaotic weather leading to forest die off, loss of synchronicity between plants and pollinators, plus heat/ drought/ and storm caused drops in crop yields.

“A Rock and a Hard Place”

Human Society can’t supply 7.8 billion people without emitting the gases that assure the food crops will suffer and fail due to the weather ahead. A scrambled jet stream is a warning of famine ahead, and the conflicts famine will lead to. Food crisis will hit sooner than previously estimated (see Climate Change & Food Security) Climate change may affect the production of maize (corn) and wheat as early as 2030 under a high greenhouse gas emissions scenario, according to a new NASA study. Maize crop yields are projected to decline 24%, while wheat could potentially see growth of about 17% (for a few decades before it too falls off.)

Discretionary energy isn’t there in quantities that can be shifted without intense resistance from people who will need to refrain from personal use. Imagine the charisma and moral integrity needed for leaders to convince the vast majority of humanity (in all the nations) to limit reproduction, and their level of consumption so as to avoid the consequences if our biosphere were to collapse as heat mounts and weather become hostile. (See Consumption affects sustainability)
By those two sets of facts alone, we are a society in hospice – though most won’t admit the diagnosis of a terminal condition. That’s what makes convenient lies so popular… more popular than the Inconvenient Truth. To survive, we must Look Up!
Here is an early draft of part III of IPCC AR6 as released last June. Science Alert reported on the reaction. For those who only want the crib notes, some meaningful sentences from the report…

• Mitigation and development goals cannot be met through incremental change
• Transition pathways entail distributional consequences such as changes in employment and economic structure
• Equity and justice are important enabling conditions for effective climate mitigation. Institutions and governance that address equity and supporting narratives that promote just transitions can build broader support for climate policymaking
• Individuals can contribute to overcoming barriers and enable climate change mitigation. Individual behavioral change in isolation cannot reduce GHG emissions significantly
• If 10-30% of the population were to demonstrate commitment to low-carbon technologies, behaviors and lifestyles, new social norms would be established
• Collective action through formal social movements and informal lifestyle movements expands the potential for climate policy and supports system change
• Estimates of committed CO2 emissions from current fossil energy infrastructure are 658 GtCO2 […] nearly double the remaining carbon budget
• Delayed action increases challenges to both economic and societal feasibility after 2030

Part III of the IPCC report relies on peer reviewed studies with data through 2018. It does not consider the data since then on carbon emissions from soils, or the increase in forest fires as examples of how even the dire tone of the warnings still fail to match the urgency of what our human society must do to avoid extinction. For the United States alone, there is still intense political resistance to a scaled down Build Back Better Plan

that includes measures to mitigate climate destabilization. This last image shows only the 2021 U.S. climate related events that were over a $Billion in consequence. (Global impacts are worse.) I looked at a prior bad year, 2017, but it had “only” 15 such events. These events are expected to continue worsening in intensity and frequency in future years. Better to invest now in mitigation efforts, despite what seems politically viable. Nature does not negotiate, and is responding to the greenhouse gases we humans have released.

Nowhere in the papers do I see plans to limit the growth in human population. From the Population Reference Bureau, “The global population is on course to reach 9.7 billion by 2050, a nearly 24% increase over 2020.” Human population growth is one of the three key aspects of human impact on the planet, yet it is not mentioned as a variable within policy options in the IPCC reporting.

CONCLUSIONS

Basically there will be major constriction of societal ability to supply current needs, let alone desires. Much of that can be temporarily met by enforcing a more equitable distribution. BUT, historically the elite of past civilizations blocked such and their civilizations collapsed. That is the lesson learned from the HANDY Study of Societal Collapse
Greater societal equity is a necessary though not necessarily sufficient condition for getting through severe environmental problems. Can humans unite to control, and peacefully shrink our consumption, even our population?
In the face of the stark warning of IPCC AR6, we can see the alternatives to uniting and peacefully responding will be extinction. We are all sharing hospice conditions together, with a terminal prognosis. Asking governments and corporations to act differently is easy – until the consequences of those changes are shared. Can we share those consequences, or will some fight to take more than their share? Again, that is the reason for the 1WOW School Program. It helps the friends of youth to actively help the leaders among them to develop the good styles of leadership so desperately needed today. Is there enough time left to raise such leaders AND implement the best responses to mitigate climate consequences?
We have no assurances, only the absolute need to try.