Thread by @dwallacewells

“The phrase Jay Inslee used was ‘permanent emergency.’” What does that mean? A thread (1/x). nymag.com/intelligencer/…

“Lytton — the town that had, days earlier, set Canada’s all-time heat record, drawing waves of ‘heat tourists’ as witnesses to ‘desert heat’ north of 120 degrees where typical June highs were in the mid-70s — burned to the ground just 15 minutes after the arrival of smoke.”

“Wildfires raging in B.C. produced their own pyrocumulus thunderstorms, which produced their own lightning strikes—3,800 lightning strikes, according to one count, each striking the dry tinder that those in the West now know to call ‘fuel.’”

Across North America, the number of lightning strikes passed 700,000.

https://twitter.com/coweatherman/status/1410621062778347522

“In Portland, Oregon, where temperatures got as high as 116, setting new records three days in a row, with power cables melting in the heat, the smoke plume from Northern California’s Lava fire settled over downtown on Tuesday.”

“If the whole region was enclosed in a ‘heat dome,’ as the meteorologists kept saying, it was beginning to fill with wildfire smoke and not slowly. While the Lava fire had grown to 15,000 acres in its first day, just on the other side of Mount Shasta burned the Tennant fire.”

“What lies ahead is quite likely to be the worst fire season in modern California history, its strongest competition the fires of last year and the ones only two years before that.”

“In British Columbia, there were at least 486 ‘sudden deaths’ in the midst of the heatwave—a number that is sure to grow many times over.”

“In Portland, at least 63 have died, and in Seattle, where less than half of homes have air conditioning, the extreme heat has put more than a thousand people in the hospital already.”

“Local hoteliers were celebrating, however — their hotels full for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic, with locals fleeing their homes in search of the relief of AC. ‘It’s been a blessing,’ one said.”

“Elsewhere in Washington State, the roads were melting and agricultural workers as young as 12 and as old as 70 were starting their shifts at 4 a.m. to try to harvest the region’s cherries and blueberries before the fruit was fried by the heat.”

“In Sacramento, residents complaining that the tap water tasted too much like dirt, thanks to the ongoing drought that may be the worst the American West has seen in millennia, were told to ‘add lemon.’”

“In Santa Barbara, people have been advised to jerry-rig DIY ‘clean-air rooms’ in preparation for the coming fire season, now already in full swing—months ahead of what used to mark the beginning of the season. Suppliers of sparklers shuttered headed into the Fourth of July.”

“In Alaska, at the edge of the heat dome, the climate writer Eric Holthaus noted, ‘calving glaciers are producing “ice quakes” as powerful as small earthquakes as they crumble into the sea.’”

https://twitter.com/ericholthaus/status/1409953279983996934

“It was hotter in parts of Canada and Oregon than it has ever been in the history of Las Vegas, smack in the middle of the Mojave Desert.”

“Even the most cautious estimates put this heat event as, by historical norms, a once-in-several-centuries phenomenon—once in the course of American history, say, or once since the invention of industrialization.”

“According to one calculation, the heat wave was five standard deviations above expectations, meaning it was an event that should arrive, in the absence of climate change, once every 5,000 years. That’s once since the age of Ancient Egypt.”

“We are experiencing that five-sigma event this year. In British Columbia, it was as hot as it was in Death Valley, California. They called it Death Valley for a reason.”

“‘This moment will be talked about for centuries,’ the meteorologist Scott Duncan predicted. But will it?”

https://twitter.com/ScottDuncanWX/status/1410097020912742404

“Prophecies often come true as anticlimaxes, the predictions themselves having set the stage too well — serving to acculturate as well as alarm, introducing first and then effectively normalizing the possibility of events that would have seemed, not so long ago, unthinkable.”

“Climate activists, often privately despondent themselves, have long worried about the costs of alarmism as a rhetorical strategy, warning it would end not in panicked action but fatalism and despair.”

“What worries me more, as an avowed alarmist, is not that dire warnings inspire leaders and potential activists to give up but that, in shifting our expectations, they encourage us to count as successes any merely catastrophic outcomes that fall short of true apocalypse.”

“Adaptability is a virtue, or at least a tool, in a time of cascading environmental change like the one we are stepping into now. It is also a painkiller or a form of climate dementia.”

“At the moment, the heat dome is triggering much more public alarm than it is complacency. But as the climate journalist Kendra Pierre-Louis suggested, in a fit of justified despair, we have been here before.”

https://twitter.com/kendrawrites/status/1410419193921560588

“Last week, a few months in advance of the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, to be held this fall, a draft of the upcoming IPCC report, which essentially summarizes the state of scientific understanding of climate change for policy-makers, was leaked to the press.”

“Agence France-Presse, which received the leak and has since guarded it quite closely, summarized the draft report in three striking paragraphs.” france24.com/en/live-news/2…

“Climate change will fundamentally reshape life on Earth in the coming decades, even if humans can tame planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions.”

“Species extinction, more widespread disease, unliveable heat, ecosystem collapse, cities menaced by rising seas — these and other devastating climate impacts are accelerating and bound to become painfully obvious before a child born today turns 30.”

“The choices societies make now will determine whether our species thrives or simply survives as the 21st century unfolds … But dangerous thresholds are closer than once thought, and dire consequences are unavoidable in the short term.”

“At two degrees, the draft suggests, 420 million more people would be exposed to extreme, potentially lethal heat waves, and 410 million more would suffer from water scarcity. By 2050, tens of millions more would suffer chronic hunger and 130 million more extreme poverty.”

“The message is literally earth-shaking. And yet beyond the corners of the climate world, it barely registered a peep, perhaps a sign that, as much as alarmism has achieved in recent years, it has also acquainted us so well with apocalyptic premonitions that new ones glide by.”

“‘Life on Earth can recover from a drastic climate shift by evolving into new species and creating new ecosystems,’ the draft reportedly concludes. ‘Humans cannot.’”

“That last part is almost certainly not true. It is also especially striking as a statement of climate fatalism, given that the report is expected to devote attention not just to the science of warming and the project of decarbonization but the need for climate adaptation.”

“That word, adaptation, has been a dirty one now for decades—a seeming excuse to delay decarbonization, which has always appeared more urgent (and correctly). But climate action alone is no longer enough—it can’t be enough, even given where we are today.”

“Almost no matter what is done, wildfires in the West are likely to grow sixfold, for instance.”

“We are living already in the muddy thick of climate difficulty, some of us sunk deeper into it than others, and we can’t let ourselves be satisfied for keeping our heads out of the muck.”

“Simply because tens of millions of people in Canada and the U.S. are living through the heat dome, however many thousands die from it, and will survive the fire season to come, however much they choke on its smoke…”

“…it would be criminal to look back on what is happening now and will happen in the months ahead and think, “We managed.”

“But probably it would be just as criminal to fail to focus on managing climate change in addition to stopping it. Indeed, almost inevitably, the matter of management will likely move more and more center stage.”

“For years now, hyperbolic headliners have used those kinds of disasters of warming to declare that the age of climate change had arrived. This year suggests the possibility of a new arrival — the age of climate adaptation.”

“Perhaps the great awakening on warming has already happened — or keeps happening and keeps being forgotten, among other reasons so that we can continue to believe we stand just at the threshold of climate suffering rather than well beyond it.”

“But the great awakening on adaptation probably still lies ahead of us. Or maybe that ‘permanent emergency’ is beginning right now.” (X/x)