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extreme weather events
When the Wealthy Perish at Sea We Mourn, But When the Poorest Perish We Yawn
3,000 deaths of migrants made barely a ripple in most of the world’s major news media. But this summer one single tragedy on the Mediterranean has been making globs of global headlines.
Sep 01, 2024
Over
3,000 migrants fleeing from poverty and conflict, the Council on Foreign Relations recently noted, died last year trying to cross the Mediterranean into Europe.
Those deaths made barely a ripple in most of the world’s major news media. But this summer one single tragedy on the Mediterranean has been making globs of global headlines.
On Monday, August 19, amid a fearsome sudden storm, a boat deemed “unsinkable” sank off the coast of Sicily’s Palermo. Seven of the 22 people on board perished.
What made this sinking so newsworthy? The ship that sank just happened to be a luxury sailing yacht that sported the world’s tallest aluminum mast. And the casualties from that superyacht’s sinking just happened to include the high-tech CEO once hailed as the “British Bill Gates.”
That chief exec, the yacht’s owner Mike Lynch, had envisioned this voyage as a celebration over a decade in the making. Just weeks earlier, after years of legal battling, a federal jury in Northern California had acquitted Lynch and one of his VPs on charges they had artificially inflated the value of Lynch’s software company. That inflating, prosecutors charged, had sealed the firm’s 2011 sale to Hewlett-Packard for over $11 billion, a deal that netted Lynch personally about $800 million.
But within a year after the sale the value of Lynch’s company had tanked by some $8.8 billion, and H-P was referring allegations of accounting improprieties against Lynch to the British Serious Fraud Office and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The referrals would eventually produce a civil-suit victory for H-P and a 2019 criminal conviction of a key exec at Lynch’s firm.
The 59-year-old Lynch and his finance VP Keith Chamberlain would have much better luck in their own criminal trial on similar charges. Unfortunately for them, they’ll never get to enjoy their acquittal. Lynch drowned in the sinking of his yacht, as did Lynch’s top trial lawyer and the chair of financial giant Morgan Stanley’s international arm, a star witness for Lynch’s defense.
What made this Lynch yacht sinking particularly irresistible for the world’s media? On the same day as the sinking, reports surfaced that Lynch’s acquitted co-defendant Chamberlain had just died after a car ran him over while he was jogging. A sheer coincidence? And how could the captain of Lynch’s superyacht and all but one of his crew escape the boat’s sinking alive while Lynch and six other passengers perished? Such juicy meat for endless conspiracy speculation!
But we need not resort to conspiratorial theorizing to understand why Lynch’s $25-million yacht sank so quickly that stormy night. That blame belongs in no small part to climate change, not some cabal of his billionaire corporate rivals.
By this past June, points out a new Financial Times analysis, water temperatures in the Mediterranean had been rising for 15 straight months. Higher water temperatures invite ever more extreme weather events. One such event — a tornado-like waterspout with “ferocious winds” howling at nearly 70 miles per hour — hit right near where Lynch had last anchored his superyacht.
Only 16 minutes passed between the moment those harsh winds first hit the yacht and the moment the yacht sank. That “rapid sinking of such a large, modern and well-equipped yacht,” adds the Financial Times, “has raised concerns over marine safety as extreme weather events occur with more frequency and intensity.”
In other words, the superyachts that typically spend summers in the Mediterranean and winters in the Caribbean better beware.
But the mega-rich who own these yachts have, in one sense, no one to blame but themselves. Our globe remains in overall climate-crisis denial in no small part because our wealthiest have so much to lose if our world gets serious about ending the profligate corporate practices now driving our planet’s climate collapse.
The ranks of these richest include, of course, the fossil-fuel industry’s top execs and investors. But all our super rich, not just the kings of Big Oil, have a vested personal interest in “calming” climate anxiety. Coming to grips with the chaos fossil fuels have already created — and speeding a worker-sensitive transition to a carbon-free future — will take enormous financial resources. The world will only be able to raise those resources if the rich and their corporations start paying their fair tax share.
A tax of between a mere 1.7 and 3.5 percent on the wealth of the world’s richest 0.5 percent, suggests the UK-based Tax Justice Network, could annually raise $2.1 trillion. Most of the world’s richest nations, notes the Tax Justice Network’s Alison Schultz, are shying away from that suggestion.
Notes Schultz: “This needs to change now — the climate can’t wait, and nor can the people of the world.”
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In 'Stern Warning Sign,' Ocean and Air Temps Break May and June Records
Some scientists predict that 2023 could be the warmest year on record, as a developing El Niño exacerbates the impacts of the climate crisis.
Jun 16, 2023
Following a May of record ocean temperatures and a June of record air temperatures, scientists are warning that 2023 could be the hottest year on record.
For a brief period in June, average global air temperatures even topped 1.5°C above preindustrial levels, the temperature goal enshrined by the Paris climate agreement.
"The world has just experienced its warmest early June on record, following a month of May that was less than 0.1°C cooler than the warmest May on record," the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) Deputy Director Samantha Burgess said in a statement. "Monitoring our climate is more important than ever to determine how often and for how long global temperatures are exceeding 1.5°C. Every single fraction of a degree matters to avoid even more severe consequences of the climate crisis."
\u201c\ud83d\udcc8\ud83c\udf21\ufe0f Global mean temperature exceeded 1.5 degrees threshold during the first days of June. Monitoring how often and for how long these breaches occur is more important than ever, if we are to avoid more severe consequences of the climate crisis. Read more: https://t.co/j4x3swOxXq\u201d— ECMWF (@ECMWF) 1686822996
Overall, global mean surface air temperatures for early June were higher than previous C3S data for the month "by a substantial margin," the service said. Between June 7 and 11, those temperatures were above 1.5°C, peaking at 1.69°C June 9, Agence France-Pressereported.
This is not the first time that averages have poked above the 1.5°C target for a limited time. In fact, ironically, the first time was around the negotiating of the Paris agreement in December 2015.
"As it happens, a strong El Niño was close to its peak at the time, and it is now estimated that for a few days the global mean temperature was more than 1.5°C higher than the preindustrial temperature for the month," C3S said. "This was probably the first time this had occurred in the industrial era."
"The global surface temperature anomaly is at or near record levels right now, and 2023 will almost certainly be the warmest year on record."
While there have been more incidents between 2015 and now, they were typically in the Northern Hemisphere winter and early spring. This is the first time averages have risen above 1.5°C in June.
The breach is a "stern warning sign that we are heading into very warm uncharted territory," Melissa Lazenby, a lecturer in climate change at Sussex University in the U.K., toldSky News.
It also comes amidst other concerning climate indicators. On Wednesday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the U.S. announced that average ocean surface temperatures for May reached a record high for the second month in a row. May 2023 overall was the third warmest May on record, and sea ice in Antarctica dwindled to record low levels for the month.
\u201c(1 of 5) IT\u2019S OFFICIAL: Earth had its 3rd-warmest #May in 2023.\n\nNorth and South America saw their warmest May on record.\n\nRecord-low May sea ice extent in the Antarctic.\n\nhttps://t.co/R4Bnlohm6S\n\n@NOAANCEI #StateOfClimate\u201d— NOAA (@NOAA) 1686754291
NOAA's findings came a week after it declared that El Niño conditions had arrived, which could exacerbate the impacts of the climate crisis to raise temperatures and fuel more extreme weather events.
\u201cEl Ni\u00f1o conditions are here, according to the latest ENSO Outlook from @NWSCPC. El Ni\u00f1o is expected to continue into the winter, with the odds of at least a moderate event are about 84%.\nhttps://t.co/X80WoUuAi7\u201d— NOAA Climate.gov (@NOAA Climate.gov) 1686241774
"The global surface temperature anomaly is at or near record levels right now, and 2023 will almost certainly be the warmest year on record," University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann toldThe Guardian. "That is likely to be true for just about every El Niño year in the future as well, as long as we continue to warm the planet with fossil fuel burning and carbon pollution."
Already this year, warm spring temperatures have had consequences, from unprecedented wildfires in Canada that smothered the Eastern and Midwestern U.S. in smoke to a fish die-off in the Gulf of Mexico.
"With climate change and global warming, it's been an interesting start to the season," NOAA climatologist Rocky Bilotta said during a press call reported by The New York Times.
University of California, Los Angeles climate scientist Daniel Swain toldABC News that the high ocean temperatures were caused by a mixture of the climate crisis, the developing El Niño, the 2022 Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai volcano eruption, and a reduction in shipping emissions that has removed cooling aerosols from the atmosphere.
\u201cThe global picture is not particularly encouraging, either.\n\nhttps://t.co/5CVKlDaIz9\u201d— Ken Caldeira (@Ken Caldeira) 1686494424
If such warming persists, it could have serious consequences because warmer oceans fuel stronger tropical storms and a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture that can worsen flooding events. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) warned in May that there was a 66% chance that El Niño would work with climate change to push at least one year's average temperature past 1.5°C above preindustrial levels between 2023 and 2027.
C3S noted that the 1.5°C and 2°C temperature targets were based on averages over 20 to 30 years. However, the service added, "as the global mean temperature continues to rise and more frequently exceed the 1.5°C limit, the cumulative effects of the exceedances will become increasingly serious."
Scientists and activists said these breaches, and other recent temperature anomalies and extreme weather events, should serve as a warning to policymakers to act quickly to phase out fossil fuels and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
"Without stronger emission cuts, the changes we are seeing are just the start of the adverse impacts we can expect to see," Cornell University atmospheric scientist Natalie Mahowald told The Guardian. "This year and the extreme events we have seen so far should serve as a warning."
Activist Bill McKibben meanwhile said the scariest element of recent weather news was that "the world isn't reacting rationally to it."
"The rapid warming over the next couple of years is likely to be our last opportunity to really act coherently as a civilization to reduce the magnitude of this crisis, and so far we are blowing it," he wrote Thursday.
Indeed, U.N. climate talks in Bonn, Germany, which were intended to prepare the way for the COP28 climate conference in the United Arab Emirates in November and December, ended Thursday with an impasse between the E.U. and climate vulnerable countries who want faster emissions cuts and a fossil fuel phaseout, and developing countries that want more climate finance from the Global North, as AFP explained.
"The gap between the Bonn political performance and the harsh climate reality feels already absurd," Li Shuo, a senior global policy adviser at Greenpeace East Asia, told AFP. "Climate impacts stay no longer on paper. People are feeling and suffering from it now."
U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres warned during a press conference Thursday that current national policies put the world on track for 2.8°C of warming by 2100.
\u201c#ClimateAction is being undermined.\n\nThere is a lack of ambition.\n\nA lack of trust.\n\nA lack of support.\n\nA lack of cooperation.\n\nAnd an abundance of problems around clarity and credibility.\n\nIt\u2019s time to wake up and step up.\u201d— Ant\u00f3nio Guterres (@Ant\u00f3nio Guterres) 1686856519
"That spells catastrophe," Guterres said. "Yet the collective response remains pitiful."
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NASA Drops Major Bomb in 'March Toward Ever-Warmer Planet'
Wunderground meteorologists declare that 'we are now hurtling at a frightening pace toward the globally agreed maximum of 2.0°C warming'
Mar 14, 2016
NASA this weekend released new data which shows that February 2016 was not only the hottest in recorded history, but it soared past all previous records, prompting scientists to describe the announcement as "an ominous milestone in our march toward an ever-warmer planet."
The average global surface temperature for February was 1.35degC warmer than the global average for the month between 1951-1980--a margin that shattered the previous record of 1.14degC, which was set just one month earlier--and exceeded preliminary figures released earlier this month.
"NASA dropped a bombshell of a climate report," wrote meteorologists Bob Henson and Dr. Jeff Masters, founder of the Weather Underground. "February 2016 has soared past all rivals as the warmest seasonally adjusted month in more than a century of global record keeping."
February's new temperature record beat that set in January 2016 by a full 0.21degC, which Masters and Henson described as "an extraordinary margin."
"We are in a kind of climate emergency now."
--Stefan Rahmstorf, Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact Research
Scientists are normally wary of highlighting a single month's temperature spike, particularly in an El Nino cycle. However, this record bests even the one set during the Super El Nino of February 1998 by 0.47degC.
Stefan Rahmstorf, from Germany's Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact Research and a visiting professorial fellow at the University of New South Wales, told the Sydney Morning Herald that the new figures are "quite stunning ... it's completely unprecedented."
And given the increasing concentration of carbon in the global atmosphere, which is driving higher long-term temperature increases as well as other extreme weather events, the string of monthly records is a foreboding sign.
Henson and Masters explain:
The real significance of the February record is in its departure from the seasonal norms that people, plants, animals, and the Earth system are accustomed to dealing with at a given time of year. Drawing from NASA's graph of long-term temperature trends, if we add 0.2degC as a conservative estimate of the amount of human-produced warming that occurred between the late 1800s and 1951-1980, then the February result winds up at 1.55degC above average. If we use 0.4degC as a higher-end estimate, then February sits at 1.75degC above average. Either way, this result is a true shocker, and yet another reminder of the incessant long-term rise in global temperature resulting from human-produced greenhouse gases.
They conclude, "we are now hurtling at a frightening pace toward the globally agreed maximum of 2.0degC warming over pre-industrial levels."
And Rahmstorf also notes, "We are in a kind of climate emergency now."
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