Quote of the Day (David Wallace-Wells, on Global Warming’s Impact on the Oceans)

“More than 90 percent of all the excess heat trapped in the atmosphere by the greenhouse effect goes into the oceans, and while climate-conscious humans may regard this as a lucky break for life on land, the math implies a different and less narcissistic emphasis: that the planet’s water, home also to a majority of its life, has absorbed nine times as much global warming as the world above the surface we know so well — and worry over so much.”—Science writer David Wallace-Wells, “The Impacts of Global Warming Are Invisible, But They’re Unimaginably Vast—With Long-Term Consequences That Will Be Hard to Predict,” The New York Times Magazine, June 30, 2024

The image accompanying this post of David Wallace-Wells was taken Sept. 28, 2019, at the 2019 Göteborg Book Fair (talking about his book The Uninhabitable Earth) by Vogler.

Quote of the Day (Simon Kuper, on Climate Change’s Impact on European Summers)

“Since the heatwaves of 2019, summer has morphed from something to crave into something to fear. Europe, which is heating twice as fast as the global average, had its hottest ever summer in 2022, breaking the record set in 2021 — all of which was before the world re-entered the hotter El Niño climate cycle. No beach is fun at 40C with wildfires on the horizon.”—Journalist Simon Kuper, “How Will Climate Change Affect the Holiday Map?” The Financial Times, July 1-2, 2023

Will this go down as the summer when Planet Earth finally awakens to the threat of climate change, when voters finally demand that politicians stop denying its existence and start spelling out what they’ll do about it?

If only!

Even so, it is remarkable the extent to which there are few places on this planet—and, more to the point, few places in the United States—that are not affected by the rising heat and humidity. Statistics don’t persuade people of much, but maybe TV footage of relatives—or, God forbid, direct experience with the consequences of a climate in the midst of a perfect storm of factors—might convince some.

At some point, I’d like to write an analysis that, jigsaw-like, puts all the pieces of together from different parts of the globe to depict what’s happening. But Simon Kuper’s recent column that I quoted from above illuminates, in concise form, what is happening in Europe.

I didn’t know until I read him, for instance, that a particularly popular European pastime—sunbathing on the French Riviera—was invented 100 years ago this summer by Gerald and Sara Murphy, the models for the expatriate couple at the heart of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel Tender Is the Night.

Nor, until I read Kuper, had I thought of how unbearable temperatures could alter European tourism patterns—and have a direct (and more often than not, unhappy) effect on this element of the continent’s economy.

The image accompanying this post is based on a 2022 European Investment Bank survey, showing an even wider implication of climate change: that more than a quarter of Europeans believe they may need to move to another region because of the phenomenon.

From my childhood, I distinctly recall a margarine commercial with the tagline, “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.” But for at least the past couple of decades, in our refusal to face up to climate change, Americans have been the fools, not the other way around. 

Maybe now, as we survey the damage, we can only hope that clown time is over.

Quote of the Day (David Remnick, on the Pentagon and Climate Change)

“In 2010, the Pentagon declared, in its Quadrennial Defense Review, that changes in the global climate are increasing the frequency and the intensity of cyclones, droughts, floods, and other radical weather events, and that the effects may destabilize governments; spark mass migrations, famine, and pandemics; and prompt military conflict in particularly vulnerable areas of the world, including the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. The Pentagon, that bastion of woolly radicals, did what the many denialists in the House of Representatives refuse to do: accept the basic science.”—David Remnick, “Comment: No More Magical Thinking,” The New Yorker, November 19, 2012

(Photo of David Remnick taken by Martin Schneider at the New Yorker Conference, May 9, 2008.)

Quote of the Day (Samuel Pepys, on London’s Great Plague)

“The people die so, that now it seems they are fain to carry the dead to be buried by daylight, the nights not sufficing to do it in. And my Lord Mayor commands people to be within at 9 at night, all (as they say) that the sick may have liberty to go abroad for ayre.”—Samuel Pepys, Diary of Samuel Pepys, describing the Great Plague of London, August 12, 1665

Let’s get this straight immediately: the image accompanying this blog post is not a mistake.
Look past the somewhat archaic diction of this entry in the famous diary of English naval bureaucrat Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) and you’ll discover he’s describing a situation that couldn’t be more contemporary: a health emergency confronting a major metropolis and world capital.

At one point in the Great Plague that gripped London from 1664 to 1666, an estimated 8,000 people died in the British capital in a single week. The dreaded disease was, in fact, the bubonic plague, spread by rats in some of the poorest sections of the city. Ultimately, an estimated 75,000-100,000 of London’s population of 460,000 succumbed to the plague.

Pepys’ diary entries paint a vivid picture of how the rapidly morphing health crisis affected contemporary culture (many people wouldn’t buy then-fashionable wigs because, they feared, the hair had been cut off the heads of disease victims). Most of all, though, what strikes you is that the panic spread because so little was known about the disease’s cause and transmission.

Contrast that with a news item that I wish had drawn more attention and outrage than it did this week: the blistering heat that has doubled Moscow’s normal daily mortality rate, devastated Russia’s stores of grains and, in a series of unforgettable images (like the one in this post), put thousands out on the street of that nation’s capital wearing masks to guard against smog.

I’d like to borrow now a line from an otherwise inarticulate former Presidential candidate, Bob Dole: “Where’s the outrage?” As Russians suffered, many American cities also endured heat waves that for awhile badly strained electrical grids and threatened the lives of the elderly and those with poor bronchial conditions. Yet the U.S. Congress did precisely nothing to move forward a global-warming bill with any sort of teeth.

In a way, we are worse off—and certainly more morally culpable—than the Londoners of Restoration England. Lacking understanding of what plagued them, Pepys and his contemporaries were powerless to stop it.

On the other hand, the first use of the term “global warming” (coined by geochemist Wallace Broecker, in an article for the journal Science) occurred 35 years ago this past Sunday, and, especially in the last two decades, evidence for this climatic change has risen with the temperatures. Yet somehow, we haven’t been able to summon the will to do anything about it.