A fire burning through forest in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, in July 2020. Image by Greenpeace International.
Unanticipated biofeedback loops are accelerating global warming, blowing the lid off existing climate projections.
A year and a half ago, climate research consensus was that even with best efforts at immediately combating climate change, an additional global temperature rise of a minimum of 2.7°F (1.5℃) by 2100 may already be “baked in.”1 Recently the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) announced, “If emissions continue at their present rate, human-induced warming will exceed 1.5°C by around 2040.”2 This definitive, undebatable conclusion shaves 60 to 70 years off estimates made just a year earlier.
What once were natural disasters are now becoming environmental catastrophes. For example, forest fires, due to global warming effects such as increased temperatures, drought patterns, and higher winds, have now become “megafires” blazing with such intensity that they create their own weather patterns and are virtually unstoppable.3, 4 They are ravaging the earth’s warming beetle-stricken forests, consuming hundreds of thousands of acres each.
Megafires have ravaged not just the Western United States and Australia, but once cooler northern regions including Canada, Alaska, and Siberia, as well as the Arctic forests even further north.
The megafires that have scorched over 49 million acres in Siberia — an area larger than the country of Greece — in just the first six months of 2020 are still burning out of control. In addition to releasing vast amounts of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere, they are turning carbon sequestering forests (which, according to the IPCC, drawdown 30% of annual carbon dioxide emissions), into carbon neutral or carbon releasing land acres.
If we don’t take significant action immediately to reduce our carbon emissions, global warming will accelerate beyond our control.
Global warming now threatens human extinction this century. The science on this is abundantly clear.
As we move into election season, support and vote for only candidates that support a Green New Deal or have a proven “A” rating when voting in support of environmental protection legislation.
1 Ashley Strickland, Earth to Warm 2 Degrees Celsius by the End of this Century, Studies Say, CNN Jul. 31, 2017 http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/31/health/climate-change-two-degrees-studies/index.html
2 Alister Doyle, Exclusive: Global Warming Set to Exceed 1.5℃, Slow Growth – U.N. Draft, Reuters, Jun. 14, 2018, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climatechange-report-exclusive/exclusive-global-warming-set-to-exceed-15c-slow-growth-un-draft-idUSKBN1JA1HD
3 Laura Parker, How Megafires Are Remaking American Forests, National Geographic Aug. 9, 2015 http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/08/150809-wildfires-forest-fires-climate-change-science/
4 Heyck-Williams, S., L. Anderson, B.A. Stein. Megafires: The Growing Risk to America’s Forests, Communities, and Wildlife. Washington, DC: National Wildlife Federation. 2017 https://www.nwf.org/-/media/Documents/PDFs/NWF-Reports/NWF-Report_Megafires_FINAL_LOW-RES_101717.ashx