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;
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
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,
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.
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.
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
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,
Over the past few weeks, monster wild fires have been raging across Europe.
In France,
Wildfires are raging in cold places where fires rarely burn: Greenland, Alaska, Siberia,
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.
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,
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,
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),
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..
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
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/