The evidence for climate change just keeps piling up. High temperature records are being set on an almost daily basis. Severe storms seem to be ravaging half of the world while the other half is suffering from drought. The weather on planet Earth is simply becoming more extreme with each passing year.
To give a few details, in early May Southeast Asia endured a weeklong heat wave that broke the all time temperature records of three countries. In the northern Tuong Duong district of Vietnam the temperature reached 44.2ºC, the hottest temperature ever recorded in that country. Just next door in Laos the city of Loang Prabang saw a temperature of 43.5ºC again surpassing that nation’s previous all time record of 42.7ºC, a record that had been set only a month before. Finally the capital of Thailand, Bangkok saw its highest ever recorded temperature of 41ºC. Millions of human beings, many living in third world conditions suffered through greater heat than they had ever experienced and remember, deaths due to overheating exceed all other weather related deaths combined.
Here in North America a similar scenario is occurring in the Pacific Northwest stretching from the states of Oregon and Washington up through the Canadian province of Alberta. While not as extreme as the heat wave in Southeast Asia daily records in many cities and towns were broken with the temperature on the 13th of May in Seattle reaching 32.2ºC, a new record for that day and the hottest temperature ever that early in the year.
Of greater concern is the effect the heat wave had on the dozens of wildfires burning in Alberta, fires that had already destroyed more than a million and a quarter acres of forest before the heat wave arrived. It almost seems as though the devastating wildfires that torched the western states of the US over the last decade are now moving north into western Canada, exactly what you would expect due to global warming.
By the way a new study from the Union of Concerned Scientists and published in the journal Environmental Research Letters concludes that more than a third, 37% of all of the forest land burned by wildfires in western North America since 1986, that’s a total of 19.8 million acres, is due to the burning of fossil fuels. The study was carried out by comparing the real life data of wildfires to an idealized model of fires in a world without fossil fuel emissions.
Those are just two snapshots out of many extreme weather events already this year. I could have discussed all of the tornadoes across the south and central US so far in 2023. Or I could have discussed the continuing drought in Spain and France, even war torn Ukraine has seen an unusually early spring thaw that has allowed the fighting there to intensify.
With all of the extreme weather events occurring across the world you’d think that the debate over climate change would be over by now. You’d think that any sensible person would see that things are getting bad and are going to get much worse if we don’t deal with the problem of CO2 emissions. But in fact the fight over global warming is actually getting even uglier.
A big change for the worst has recently taken place since Elon Musk took over control of twitter. Musk’s firm commitment to ‘Free Speech’, any kind of speech, has opened the door to vicious attacks on climate scientists. On top of that Musk also laid off nearly half of Twitter’s work force including most of those assigned to finding and eliminating hate speech from the platform.
The result has been a enormous increase in misinformation about climate change as well as outright threats on Twitter against climate scientists. According to Professor of Earth Science Mark Maslin at University College London, who is also the author of popular books on climate change such as ‘How to Save Our Planet’, “There’s been a massive change. I get so much abuse and rude comments now. It’s happening to all of us, but I challenge the climate deniers so I’ve been really targeted.”
Not all climate scientists are as feisty as Professor Maslin however. Doug McNeall is a statistician studying climate change at the MET Office Hadley Center of Exeter University who asserts that the constant abuse has become nerve wracking. “I got to the point where it was definitely affecting my mental health.”
Many of the climate deniers even pay subscriptions to Twitter in order to get their attacks higher up in the list of replies to a scientist’s tweet. Which makes you wonder who is paying these people to be climate deniers. Perhaps worst of all however is the fact that a recent survey of 468 international climate scientists has found that one in eight female climate scientists has received online threats of sexual violence from climate deniers.
How much of this abusive climate denialism is actually being paid for by the oil and gas industry we’ll probably never know. But remember, Exxon-Mobile made a record $55.7 billion Dollars in profit last year, Shell made $39.9 billion profit while Chevron made $35.5 billion profit and poor little BP had to make do with only $27.7 billion, in profit! That’s more than enough to pay a few hundred, or a few thousand computer geeks to spread lies and distortions about what the petroleum industry is doing to our world.
The fate of our world depends on whether we listen to the climate scientists or the climate deniers. There isn’t much time left to decide.