There have been a whole raft of tweets in the past week from climate scientists about temperature. Something important happening but mostly beyond my science literacy, so I have been waiting for someone to translate into language that most of us can understand. Here it is.
This tweet from Roger Hallam, ex-farmer, veteran climate activist and co-founder of Extinction Rebellion,
So here’s how we should look at all this temperature stuff. The fundamental thing to understand is that there is a cut off point where the human body dies in 6 hours (Wet Bulb Effect)- around 35C to 50C, depending on the humidity. As I keep reminding people, when people die they do not come back – unlike just being ill. These are the two key facts.
So really the thing to think about is not, hey it is now 30C at night in Crete in March every year or two. The KEY THING is how often is it going to be 50C at night in Crete? Let’s say that is every 20 years – so half the population dies in one day every 20 years.
This is why THE AVERAGE is completely irrelevant – the horror is in how often the long tail happens – how often a place hits the “all humans die in one day” point.
So if at 1C it is once in 10 000 years – at 2C it might be once in 100 years – at 3C once in 20 years (i.e., effective human extinction). At 1C things are tricky – at 2C things are super risky – at 3C half the world has to move because every 20 years they all die if they stay put.
Of course you are going to say well people will adapt (have underground shelters etc). Sure some people survive in the Sahara. But try doing that in an area such as France!
The biggest social shock of human history is going to be when the first mass mortality event happens suddenly and what I have written in this post will become the most important information in the world. And then everyone will go – oh fuck fuck fuck. The door of the gas chamber has closed.
In case you are interested in how this has worked in history you can read the “general crisis” on the 1C drop in temperatures in the seventeenth century when the global population dropped by a third. You can see that the mass death events happened all in one go when extreme climate events happened – droughts and extreme cold temperatures. When these happened two years in a row it took generations for the population to recover. And it did of course. But this time round it will never change. It will just get worse.
The researchers concluded: “The geographic range and frequency of non-compensable heat extremes will increase rapidly, given only moderate continued increase in global average temperatures. This implies that, in the near future, a substantial portion of the world’s population will be exposed to these non-compensable environmental conditions.”
“a real risk” of widespread exposure with “hundreds of millions of people” affected before they were sufficiently heat-adapted to avoid attendant increases in deaths and illness.”
In case it’s not clear, those forward projections have three key meanings:
New Zealand will not be immune from wet bulb events.
What we do right now determines what happens in 20 years. Anyone currently under the age of 80 who thinks they will live to a ripe old age needs to reconsider what that now means in climate collapse terms
We can still avert utter catastrophe if we all many of us act now.
Here is one of the other co-founders of XR, also a veteran climate activist, academic philosopher, and current director of the Climate Majority Project, Rupert Read. Where Hallam is on the leading edge of radical climate action, Read is part of the ‘moderate flank’ who are doing the mahi of working with the mainstream on climate. He’s not holding back either. In response to the following tweet about temperatures in India he said,
What are we even doing talking about 1.5 still allegedly being alive when we are passing it in real time? And NB: This year is likely going to be even worse. The line is still going upwards.
Only once we let go off impossible dreams can we (a) actually feel the full horror of what has happened, thus rocket-fuelling us, and (b) get serious about transformative adaptation (and loss and damage)…
That’s the really bad news. The good news is that we have more choice now than ever before on how to act with meaning and purpose. Today is the Climate Strike, and beyond that every social and political action we do can sit within an awareness of the climate crisis and making a difference.
In every community in New Zealand there are people working on climate action and building a survivable future for us all. Find them and join in, or if you are already there, share what is being done. People need to hear about the things that make a difference and the stories of how this all works out.