In August, a new study showed that wildfires are now consuming twice as much global tree cover as they did in 2001, converting forests from carbon sinks into carbon emitters, marking a “fire-climate feedback loop,” one of the warming accelerants that scientists have long warned about.Īs major climate effects move from risk to inevitability, our challenge is to do all we can to not only reduce emissions, but also to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere by every means at our disposal. Hundreds of thousands are facing imminent starvation or migration. Thousands of people have died of heatstroke or drowned in massive floods. In the past several months, wildfires, “thousand-year” floods, megadroughts and heat waves have raged in northern China and North America, in Europe, India, Pakistan and Africa. This summer has given us a hint of what catastrophic climate conditions look like.

But the 10 hottest years in recorded history all occurred since 2005, and the heat already built into the system makes it unlikely that we will limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the difference between dangerous and catastrophic impacts. The Inflation Reduction Act could potentially produce a 40% reduction of greenhouse gases by 2030, based on 2005 emissions (16% higher than 1990’s). Al Gore called that pitiful).įive years later, while trying to save another climate agreement in Kyoto, Japan, then-Vice President Gore pledged to reduce U.S. delegation promised to reduce America’s carbon dioxide emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2000 (then-Sen. I remember reporting from the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro when the U.S. We need to view its provisions and incentives less as putting an end to heat waves, wildfires and algal blooms and more as triage - doing what we can while we can to salvage what we might. With the Inflation Reduction Act in August, President Biden signed the first major climate bill in U.S. We could have prevented it, but we failed to do what was required. But now they’re coming to a neighborhood near you. It used to be that climate emergencies happened somewhere else. Today the bay’s waters are dark brown from a harmful algal bloom and the air smells of decay and dead fish.īoth incidents, like the heat dome California’s been suffering under since last week, have links to climate change. The air smelled of wood fire, and gray ash covered my car.

Two years ago the sky above my San Francisco Bay Area home was a dark pumpkin orange from wildfire smoke. By David Helvarg / Los Angeles Times / Sept.

San deigo tide graph