Apocalypse Still: Hurricanes, Floods, And Fire

       Last year around this time I posted over two days two blogs, the first about the hurricanes that were wreaking destruction along our Gulf Coast and the second about the wildfires that were ravaging not only our West Coast but forest areas around the globe, even in Siberia and the Arctic.
     Today our Gulf coast is again being devastated by hurricanes and our West Coast is again an inferno, and not only our West Coast:
        ​​ This year wildfires have raged in forest area outside Marseilles, France;

​...in Andalucia, Spain;

​... in southern Greece;

...in Australia.

​      The Amazon wildfires are surging worse than last year.
       Wildfires are still burning in Siberia.
       The Arctic is burning like never before.
     According to the NASA earth observatory, "Following an active 2019 season, fires in 2020 have again been abundant, widespread, and have produced abnormally large carbon emissions."
       And so, as this year's natural disasters wrought by climate change are merely a continuation of last year's and the year before's - except that this year the misery for those hit by these fires and hurricanes is worsened by the additional misery of the COVID -19 pandemic - I've decided to repost here those two posts from last year, "Apocalypse Now: Hurricanes and Floods" and "Apocalypse Now: Fires." Hence today's blog is a little longer than usual. But maybe you have the time.     

APOCALYPSE NOW: HURRICANES AND FLOODS
​  9/4/2019

   Dear Future Cyberarchivist who, while sifting through ancient internet postings from bygone centuries in search of the history of humankind, has come across this blog chronicling the events and observations of life in the first quarter of the 21st Century AD:
      Two years ago I entered in this web log a post about a monstrous hurricane that hit Texas, a coastal state along the Southwestern seaboard of the country where I live, known today as the United States of America. (You may, if you wish and are able to, look up that post, entitled "Hurricane Harvey, 21st Century Behemoth" and dated 9/5/2017).
       At that time Hurricane Harvey was among the worst natural disasters to the hit our country, and surely the worst, most destructive hurricane, destroying much of the Texas city of Houston.
    This hurricane was a new weather phenomenon in its size and in that, unlike previous hurricanes, it moved very slowly so that it stayed for days hovering over the city of Houston,

​...where it dumped over 50 inches of rain.

​   At the time Hurricane Harvey was considered to be the worst hurricane in history - it had been preceded in 2005 by previous record-setting Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the city of New Orleans, and in 2012 by Superstorm Sandy that hit the eastern coastal state of New Jersey - and forecasters pronounced Hurricane Harvey to be a once-in-500-years weather event. 
    But that very same year, 2017, two more equally monstrous hurricanes, Irma and Maria, defied the forecasters and wreaked havoc on the southeastern coastal state of Florida and some nearby islands in the Caribbean Sea and laid waste to the island of Puerto Rico, killing over 3,000 people.

​ Two years later the island of Puerto Rico has still not recovered.

​ Almost exactly one year later, in early September of 2018, another monster hurricane called Hurricane Florence churned up in the too-warm waters of the Atlantic Ocean and slammed into the south eastern coastal states of North Carolina and South Carolina,

​...then swirled in place, barely moving  for days, causing in that area destruction and floods of historic proportion.

​ A month later the Florida coast, not yet recovered from the destruction wreaked by the unprecedented storms Irma and Maria from the previous year, was again hit, this time by a  a hurricane even more savage than Hurricanes Irma and Maria, a monster from the sea called Hurricane Michael,

​...which reached record wind speeds of 185 miles an hour,

​...and set a new record for size, strength, and destruction.

   And one year later, today, September 4, 2019, Hurricane Dorian, a behemoth hurricane every bit as destructive as Hurricane Michael was last year, is churning off the beleaguered south eastern coast of the United States, with predictions that it will make landfall soon.

​     But since its nascence in the Atlantic Ocean several days ago Hurricane Dorian has already laid siege to the Caribbean Island group to the southeast of the United States known as the Bahamas with 185-mile-an-hour winds and rains that have caused terrible devastation and loss of life. 

​   "Apocalyptic," "Unprecedented," "Truly catastrophic," "A historic tragedy," are the words that are being used by those who have seen the destruction of Hurricane Dorian to the Bahamas.    
      And yet for the past three years at the end of summer monster storms have been rising up out of the Atlantic Ocean, each one worse than the previous, each one breaking unprecedented records of size, strength, and destruction.
        And note this, Historian of the Future: we, the people of the planet Earth, know perfectly well the cause of these apocalyptic weather events.
      For years every reputable scientist on the planet has been reporting that climate change caused by global warming caused by humans' overuse of fossil fuels is the cause of, and will continue to be the cause of, these monster storms. According to scientists bigger, slower, wetter - and consequently stronger, more intense and more destructive - hurricanes are the product of the rising temperatures of the ocean in which they are born.
        And we know, we absolutely know on this day, September 4, 2019, how to stop this terrible climate trend that we have caused. We even have the the technology to to replace fossil fuels with clean energy sources.
         But our country, The United States of America, the most powerful country by far on the planet, is currently ruled by foolish old men devoured by greed and personal power, which they put far above the welfare of our nation and our world.

​  These foolish old men refuse to stand up to the obscene wealth and power of the fossil fuel industry because they themselves are in the pockets of the rich men who rule that industry.
     And so, the worried scientists tell us, year after year the hurricanes will come and they will get worse as the planet warms. And we could stop this. But as of today we are doing nothing.
      And while this part of the world is being destroyed by wind and water, other parts of the world are being destroyed by fire.

References:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/02/world/americas/hurricane-dorian-bahamas.html

"A Warmer World Makes Hurricanes Wetter and More Intense,"
https://www.apnews.com/47d8e0bf05354260931de08ad9976a37

APOCALYPSE NOW: FIRES  9/6/2019

​Fires detected over the past year, 2018-2019:

     Dear Future Cyberchivist:
     By the year 2019 the world has become too hot.
    Human's excessive burning of fossil fuels - oil, coal, natural gas - over the last few decades to inexpensively feed our existence such as it is has caused the formation of a layer of carbon gases called greenhouse gases that traps too much heat of the sun in our lower atmosphere. 
    This has subsequently raised the temperature of the earth to a dangerous level.
     Hence our too-warm oceans now spawn behemoth hurricanes,

​...that leave in their wake horrifying devastation and death.

​ And while coastal areas and islands in the sea are being ravaged by hurricanes and floods, fires of historic proportions are burning around the world.
     Over the past few weeks, monster wild fires have been raging across Europe.
    In France,

...Spain,

...Greece,

...Turkey,

...and Russia.

    Fires are flaming in the jungles of Indonesia and across the African Savanna.
    Wildfires are raging in cold places where fires rarely burn: Greenland, Alaska, Siberia, 

... the Arctic Circle.

​     Meanwhile the layer of ice at the top of the world known as the Polar Ice Cap is melting. The sea-ice of the Arctic Ocean is melting. The glaciers, moving frozen rivers of ice in polar regions, are melting. All the ice in the world is melting.
      And here in the United States of America, my country, while Hurricane Dorian besieges our East Coast (see yesterday's post), our West Coast burst into flames yesterday from a new wild fire in the city of Murrieta, south of Los Angeles in the state of California.
        1,000 acres have already been destroyed by that fire.

      Scientists see this plague of fire as being driven by the earth's rising temperature; but the fires are in turn exacerbating the heating of the earth by releasing more heat-trapping greenhouse gases and killing the trees that help remove those climate-warming gases from the air.
      And so its a vicious circle: the global warming causes the fires which cause more global warming. 
     But the most tragic and destructive fire currently ravaging the planet is, ironically, not one that has been cause by global warming, but one that has been set by humans.
        The Amazon, the world's largest tropical rain forest,      

​...covers much of South America and has been called "The Lungs of the Earth" because its two-million square-miles of cooling trees and plant life release oxygen into the atmosphere,

​ ...and remove carbon dioxide, the heat-trapping greenhouse gas that is a major cause of global warming. The thousands of rivers that flow through the Amazon bring cooling humidity to the planet and rain to the surrounding areas.
       However in recent years cattle and soybean farmers in the country of Brazil, where most of the Amazon rain forest is located, have been deforesting the Amazon, cutting down the vegetation then burning the area to turn it from jungle to cattle grazing and farmland,

...to feed the world's voracious appetite for beef and soy.
        Brazil is the world's largest exporter of beef cattle. The United States used to be the world's largest exporter of soy beans, which thrive on the fertile plains of the American West and Midwest.
          However the current President of the United States of America, a foolish, greedy, power-hungry rich old man named Donald Trump (see yesterday's post),   ​

...has plunged our country into a reckless trade war with China, to the end that China, the former consumer of a quarter of all soybeans produced in the United States, no longer buys soybeans from our farmers, but has turned to Brazil for its soy bean imports.
     Subsequently American soy bean farmers are going bankrupt while their fertile fields lie fallow and Brazilian farmers are burning down more of the Amazon rain forest to produce more soy beans to send to China.
      The fires set in the Amazon are up by 80% this year over previous years and the Amazon is being destroyed at a record-breaking rate..

​     Scientist warn that if the loss of the Amazon passes a certain threshold it may never recover and will no longer be a rain forest,

​... but could become a savanna, a grassy area with few trees.

​       In that case, we're told that the death of the Amazon rain forest would release billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere that had previously been absorbed by the rain forest vegetation, making the planet even hotter and dryer.
       And so, dear Future Archivist, that is where we stand today, September 6, 2019.
       Scientists tell us that if we are to preserve the planet as the green, verdant, life-filled, productive, beautiful gift given to us by our Creator we must act now to clean our atmosphere of fossil fuel emissions, clean our waters of the pollution, plastic and chemicals we've dumped into our rivers and oceans - well, that's another global problem besides the warming - and change our life styles to become better stewards of the Earth.
       Scientists say this is the moment. Some say it's already too late.
       Of course, only you of the future know.
​
​References
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/28/climate/fire-amazon-africa-siberia-worldwide.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/23/world/americas/amazon-fire-brazil-bolsonaro.html

https://www.vox.com/2019/8/22/20828219/amazon-rainforest-wildfire-photos-fire-greenland

https://www.newsweek.com/nasa-images-show-africa-has-five-times-more-wildfires-burning-amazonheres-why-theyre-1456382

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/26/unprecedented-more-than-100-wildfires-burning-in-the-arctic-in-worst-ever-season

https://www.mintpressnews.com/MyMPN/goodbye-flying-rivers-amazon-rainforest-drying/

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-rainforest-experiencing-record-breaking-deforestation-2019-7

https://www.edf.org/climate/will-wildfires-keep-spreading-climate-change

​ References 
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/16/climate/wildfires-globally.html​

https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/14/us/california-wildfires-monday/index.html

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-08-19/amazon-rainforest-fires-burn-continues-despite-promises

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/147083/another-intense-summer-of-fires-in-siberia

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02568-y

https://www.dw.com/en/thousands-evacuated-in-france-as-forest-fires-rage-near-marseille/a-54443041#:~:text=Thousands%20evacuated%20in%20France%20as%20forest%20fires%20rage%20near%20Marseille,-At%20least%2022&text=Fires%20have%20spread%20through%20camping,the%20evacuation%20of%202%2C700%20people.

https://www.dw.com/en/brazil-amazon-rainforest-fires-surge-in-july/a-54405259

https://www.theolivepress.es/spain-news/2020/08/29/600-evacuated-from-series-of-forest-fires-across-spains-andalucia/