[Mark Gongloff] California floods and Chile fires

After a 2023 filled with climate disasters, 2024 seems in a hurry to top it, with atmospheric rivers in California, wildfires in Chile, drought in Spain and more in just the first weeks. Even as humanity is missing its goals for limiting global warming, nature is reminding us that every tenth of a degree of heat we can avoid will be precious.

While Joni Mitchell sang “I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now” at the Grammy Awards in the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles on Sunday night, the clouds outside were dumping more than 4 inches of rain on the city in 24 hours. That’s more than the city usually gets in an entire February. Dangerous flooding and landslides were rampant from Santa Barbara to San Diego. More than half a million homes were without power.

All of this was the result of the latest “atmospheric river” to pound California this winter; the West Coast has experienced three in roughly two weeks. These giant firehoses in the sky can hold up to 15 times as much water as the Mississippi. They can be beneficial, as they were a year ago, when a series of them helped rehydrate the parched state. They can also be deadly. And because hotter air holds more water, climate change is making them bigger and more potentially destructive. One study has suggested climate change will make future atmospheric rivers up to 40 percent wetter.

Other places would do anything for an atmospheric river right now. More than 100 people have died, with hundreds more missing, as a result of a wildfire in Chile that has burned more than 16,000 acres so far. It’s summer in the Southern Hemisphere, Chile’s typical wildfire season. But climate change, along with an El Nino weather pattern in the Eastern Pacific, have contributed to the worst megadrought in the region in a millennium, along with soaring summer temperatures, following record-smashing heat last winter.

It’s still winter in Catalonia, but officials last week declared a water emergency for Barcelona and its surrounding area as reservoirs fell to dangerous levels after roughly three years of drought. Once again, climate change is playing a role. Even as it makes storms wetter in some places, it makes dry places like Spain even drier.

This follows a year of wildfires in Canada, Hawaii and Greece, flooding in Libya and Vermont, a cyclone in Malawi and Myanmar, and much more. Climate-fueled disasters killed at least 12,000 people last year, according to one count. A changing climate has already killed at least 4 million people globally in the past 20 years, according to a study released last week by Georgetown University Medical Center biologist Colin Carlson. And that’s probably a vast undercount given that it excludes many diseases and wildfire impacts.

The financial costs are enormous. Last year, the US alone suffered 28 natural disasters costing $1 billion or more, a record, according to the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information. Between the atmospheric rivers and brutal polar-vortex incursions -- also possibly made more likely by climate change -- since the year began, 2024 is on pace to be another historically destructive year.

Typing out all this gloom and doom is possibly more exhausting than it is for you to read it. But it’s important to put it all into context: This will likely end up being a relatively pleasant interlude, given how much more global heating is coming.

Earth so far has warmed by only about 1.2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial averages. Every tenth of a degree by which we crank up the global thermostat increases the atmospheric chaos and threatens tipping points that could fuel exponentially more warming and destruction. With this in mind, world leaders at the United Nations climate confab in Paris in 2015 vowed to limit warming to 2 degrees Celsius, with a stretch goal of trying to keep it to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

At the moment, we’re failing. Current policies have the world on pace for about 2.7 degrees Celsius of warming by the end of this century. Some observers, including former NASA scientist James Hansen, say limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius is hopeless. The window to achieve that goal is certainly slamming shut, with scientists giving us less than a decade to turn things around. Some even say 2 degrees Celsius is a lost cause.

One such person, the billionaire philanthropist and Microsoft founder Bill Gates, recently claimed, “The world does not end at 2 degrees.”

It was perhaps an effort to express the kind of optimism humanity needs to put in the hard hours to avoid true doomsday. And Gates is right in the sense that the world will continue to orbit the Sun when it is 2 degrees Celsius hotter. It will even continue to host human beings.

But those human beings will be increasingly threatened and miserable. Given how dangerous the world has become at just 1.2 degrees Celsius of warming, we can’t be nonchalant about inviting even more danger. Every new disaster should be a goad to do all we can to prevent much, much worse.

Mark Gongloff

Mark Gongloff is a Bloomberg Opinion editor and columnist covering climate change. -- Ed.

(Tribune Content Agency)

By Korea Herald(khnews@heraldcorp.com)