The Company We Keep - 343

 The United States recently joined an exclusive climate club.  Before disclosing its members, let's examine the big climate picture.

In 2023, we had an El Nino year that set new warm temperature records. The El Nino is when ocean surface temperatures are warmer than usual.  This pretty much shut down winter recreation in the U.P., except for the downhill ski areas making snow. Many people said we should not worry, as it was just an El Nino year, and we could expect a cool La Nina year in 2024.  I held my tongue because the ten previous years were very warm, setting new records nearly every year.  These have been the warmest temperatures the Earth has ever seen since homo sapiens started walking upright.

Rising planetary temperatures mean more extreme weather, but how does that relate to human well-being? A group of climate scientists painstakingly analyzes extreme weather events to see if they can be attributed to climate change. The organization is called the World Weather Attribution (WWA).

The WWA team aims to find the deadly fingerprints of climate change. They examined ten extreme weather events to gauge how deadly climate change is. They looked at three massive tropical typhoons in the Indo-Pacific. These were Typhoon Sidr, which hit Bangladesh; Typhoon Nargis, which hit Myanmar; and Typhoon Haiyan, which passed through the Philippines. The WWA examined two heavy rainfall events. One was in India, and another was in the Mediterranean in 2023. The Mediterranean deluge was the worst, hitting Libya and drowning 12,352 Libyans. The one drought they examined parched the Horn of Africa in 2011. It was exceptionally deadly, killing 258,000 people.

As reported by the World Weather Attribution Team, the events they examined caused more than 570,000 deaths. In all of them, they found science-based evidence of climate change being involved in every one.   

The most troubling to me was the four European heat waves they analyzed. If you are planning a trip to Europe, go during the shoulder seasons of spring and fall. Europe is warming twice as fast as the United States, and with this rise in temperature comes a rise in heat-related deaths. In their analysis, the WWA did not go back to the 2003 heat wave which killed 70,000 Europeans. But they did examine the heat waves of these years: In 2010, 55736 Russians succumbed to the heat. In 2015, 3275 French died. Tragically, in 2022, 53542 Europeans could not handle the heat.  In 2023, 37129 Europeans perished in the heatwaves.

Since 2003, Europeans have had time to adapt to these heat waves, but the heat waves have been too intense for too long.

Here is how the WWA Team summarizes the climate situation: "The result underscores both how dangerous extreme weather events have already become with 1.3°C of global warming, and the urgency of reducing emissions. With warming set to reach around 3 °C of warming by the end of this century given currently implemented policies, the hazards posed by events like those analyzed will only worsen. We stress that our study does not capture the hundreds of thousands of heat-related deaths which are not routinely reported or studied in most regions of the world."

Is this manmade, relentless rise in temperature and associated death going to cease? No, not anytime soon.

For the second time, President Trump, who says Climate Change is a Hoax, has pulled the largest economy in the world out of the Paris Climate Accord.

While Elon Musk and Donald Trump are excited to plant our flag on Mars, they have given up on Earth, knowing that there are people like us who cannot afford a ticket to the red planet. They have turned their backs on 195 countries still hoping to save Earth.

When we exited the Paris Climate Accord, we also joined an exclusive climate club of countries that have chosen not to be bothered by natural disasters caused by human-caused extreme weather.

Members of this exclusive club include Iran, Libya, Yemen, and now, the United States of America.

The three original members of this club have one thing in common:  Oil is their elites' primary source of income. President Trump has vowed to "drill, baby drill" in hopes of making oil and natural gas the largest source of income for the United States and Donald Trump.

This pursuit of more oil is ridiculous. We are already the world's largest oil producer, producing more than we consume.

This drill-baby-drill is in complete opposition to the scientific community. Scientists have been pleading for politicians to create policies to keep coal, oil, and gas safely in the ground while there is still a chance to save a climate-friendly Earth.

And regarding our new-found fossil mates, Iran, Libya, and Yemen, is it true that a man can be judged by the company he keeps? 

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