Climate Changed Already

August 13, 2019

Windy, sunshine-filled late afternoon Tuesday here on California’s North Coast — good weather off good climate.

Speaking of which, this exchange during a Humboldt County Board of Supervisors meeting last February on a just-released North Coast climate assessment:

Third District Supervisor Mike Wilson suggested that Humboldt County could be where “climate refugees” seek refuge.
“We have people coming here from the Carr Fire,” Wilson said, referring to the deadly wildfire in Shasta County in mid-2017.
Grantham (Ted Grantham, a University of California Berkeley researcher who worked on the climate assessment) said that was a “plausible outcome.”
“There are parts of California that are not going to be pleasant places to be,” he said.
“It makes sense that people will come here.”

Almost a certainty. And soon, too.
Yet what about sea-level rise? Will we have to retreat inland? As the climate situation becomes even more dire in a lot of places, people will have to relocate somewhere. And the North Coast is a good-weather place, a tilt toward the chilly side, but comfortable. Beyond the migration…
In June, research made-public on the big impact-cost of sea-level rise on the area: ‘The study, from the Center for Climate Integrity in partnership with the engineering for Resilient Analytics, found the problem would be particularly acute in Humboldt County, which would have to spend $2.5 billion (the second most of any California county) to build 142 miles of seawall (the third most of any California county). That $2.5 billion price tag, the study points out, equates to more than $18,000 per county resident, or roughly six times the county’s annual general fund.’

Major problem with the scenario, apart from the big bucks, is time — shit has already hit the fan.
A most-enlightening, and most-alarming story this morning on our climate ‘crisis‘ at the Washington Post, an in-depth view into a future here already.
Read the whole piece, goes into detail on actual reality of how the US and the world is being irregularity baked — high points:

Over the past two decades, the 2 degrees Celsius number has emerged as a critical threshold for global warming.
In the 2015 Paris accord, international leaders agreed that the world should act urgently to keep the Earth’s average temperature increases “well below” 2 degrees Celsius by the year 2100 to avoid a host of catastrophic changes.
The potential consequences are daunting.
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that if Earth heats up by an average of 2 degrees Celsius, virtually all the world’s coral reefs will die; retreating ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica could unleash massive sea level rise; and summertime Arctic sea ice, a shield against further warming, would begin to disappear.
But global warming does not heat the world evenly.
A Washington Post analysis of more than a century of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration temperature data across the Lower 48 states and 3,107 counties has found that major areas are nearing or have already crossed the 2-degree Celsius mark.

— Today, more than 1 in 10 Americans — 34 million people — are living in rapidly heating regions, including New York City and Los Angeles.
Seventy-one counties have already hit the 2-degree Celsius mark.
— Alaska is the fastest-warming state in the country, but Rhode Island is the first state in the Lower 48 whose average temperature rise has eclipsed 2-degrees Celsius.
Other parts of the Northeast — New Jersey, Connecticut, Maine and Massachusetts — trail close behind.
— While many people associate global warming with summer’s melting glaciers, forest fires and disastrous flooding, it is higher winter temperatures that have made New Jersey and nearby Rhode Island the fastest warming of the Lower 48 states.

The Gulf Stream is enormous, encompassing more water than “all of the world’s rivers combined,” according to NOAA.
It is one part of an even larger global “conveyor belt” of currents that transport heat around the world.
A slowing of these currents, which scientists think is caused by the melting of Arctic ice, has pushed the Gulf Stream closer to the East Coast, bringing more warm water and, perhaps, hotter temperatures onshore.
Offshore, it has become its own hot spot, helping to boost water temperatures by 2-degrees Celsius or more in some regions.

And along with natural forces responding to stimuli, we’ve the absolute-villainous T-Rump (New York Times): ‘A coalition of 29 states and cities on Tuesday sued to block the Trump administration from easing restrictions on coal-burning power plants, setting up a case that could determine how much leverage the federal government has to fight climate change in the future.’

Maybe we be fucked…

(Illustration above found here).

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