CLIMATE CHANGE REPORTS CONFIRM WHAT WE SEE OUT THE WINDOW

CA wildfires: global warming at its worst. (ABC News)

Wildfires in California, Greece, Sweden. Floods in Pennsylvania, India, England. Hurricanes in Florida and North Carolina; typhoons in Japan and the Philippines. Droughts in Australia, South America, Africa. Extremes of temperature, well, everywhere. Ocean temperatures rising. Ice caps melting. Islands disappearing.

A plot for a dystopian novel of the future? No. Just a status report on the world’s climate. Something you could read in detail in the just-released Fourth National Climate Assessment, just released from, of all places, the U.S. White House. (The report is required by Congress every four years.) This year’s report was released the day after Thanksgiving (Black Friday), but its conclusions were so startling it made news even in the midst of the post-holiday shopping frenzy.

If you needed support for those conclusions you could find them in the latest State of the Climate 2018 report from the World Meteorological Organization. The WMO report declares the last four years have been the hottest on record for the planet.

The National Climate Assessment is based on the work of scientists and analysts across 13 agencies throughout the U.S. government and focuses on the impact of climate on the U.S. alone. The WMO collects data from countries and remote locations around the world to provide a global perspective. Both scientific reports describe the devastation, in both financial and human terms, of the many climate-related events that are already occurring. Both reports lay the blame for the global rise in temperatures on the activity of humans—the generation of greenhouse gases, deforestation, pollution. And both warn of dire consequences if nothing is done to change that human behavior.

Because the World Meteorological Organization has more freedom to speak, its conclusions are blunter. Action must be taken now to reduce greenhouse gases (ie. to reduce the dependence on fossil fuels that produce them) or the planet faces possibly irreversible damage—inundation of vulnerable coastlines, famines, disruption of world economics and displacement of human populations.

“Every bit matters,” said Elena Manaenkova, the WMO deputy secretary general. “Every fraction of a degree of warming makes a difference to human health and access to food and fresh water, to the extinction of animals and plants, to the survival of coral reefs and marine life.”

The WMO report says we have no more than 12 years to make major changes before it will be too late to avoid disaster. Consider: it has taken us since the dawn of the Industrial Age to reach this point of no return, some 250 years. As Petteri Taalas, the secretary general of the WMO, a leading authority on climate change, says: “We are the first generation to fully understand climate change and the last generation to be able to do something about it.”

Reversing direction on our excesses will take time, even if we all agree and start now with the best of will. That, however, is saying a lot.

*Warning: Political Opinion Ahead*

It is less a political statement than an observable fact to say that our current governmental leadership in the U.S. is willfully blind to scientific fact on the subject of climate change. The President has no scientists of note in his Cabinet to advise him in this area; instead, he relies on businessmen from fossil-fuel energy industries to set our environmental policies and long-term climate change strategies. He admits that he has only read “some” of the Climate Assessment Report and disbelieves its conclusions.

Sacrifice now or pay the consequences later.

You could say that’s a natural optimist talking. I have another word for it. But when I was a youngster, my mama told me the story of a lazy grasshopper and a bunch of industrious ants with winter coming. I don’t think that story applies just to a change of seasons. It might just apply to a change of climate, too. I’m thinking the ants have the right idea--prepare for the snow even while the sun shines.

Cheers, Donna

Information for this post provided from:

“Past four years hottest on record, data shows,” by Fiona Harvey, The Guardian, November 29, 2018.

“New U.S. Climate Assessment Forecasts Dire Effects On Economy, Health,” by Jennifer Ludden and Christopher Joyce, NPR, November 26, 2018.

MAKE IT RAIN:EVEN SFR SHOULD HAVE WEATHER

One thing you learn very quickly here in the mountains of North Carolina is that the weather can turn on a dime. Wake up in the morning and it’s nice and sunny; by noon the clouds have come over the ridgeline and the rain is falling. If you’re really unlucky, by nightfall the temperatures have dropped and the rain has turned to snow. If you don't know what I mean, take a look at some of Laurie's pics of Winter Storm Goliath that hit New Mexico recently.

This is my first winter here, so I haven’t experienced all that Mother Nature has to offer, but I’ve learned enough to be wary. If I were honest, I’d have to say I absorbed that suspicion at my own mother’s knee. In the days before wide interstate highways, she never went home to West Virginia for a visit between the months of October and May. Heck, even after the interstates were built she stayed off the switchbacks leading to her little mountain hometown in the dead of winter. You just never knew when a storm would blow in and leave those mountain curves deadly with ice.

I read an article recently that put this in focus. A woman from the city had moved to rural Montana and was struck by the way the weather was a constant presence, a force to be reckoned with in a way she’d never experienced in her urban life. I imagine anyone living in the Rockies, the Appalachians, Tornado Alley, the Snow Belt, hurricane-prone coasts or the flood plain of any river knows what she was talking about. In those places you watch the weather report obsessively, whether you’re a farmer or fisherman or not. You watch the sky. And if things start looking ugly, you batten down.

Writers of contemporary or historical romance are fond of using the weather as a major plot device, or at least part of the setting. How many lovers have been stranded by snowstorms or caught in rainstorms and forced to seek shelter alone together? Floods and hurricanes wreak havoc, too, though they tend to be messy. The long-term effect of drought can be a plot point for some stories, causing folks to almost lose the ranch, for example.

In SF and SFR, though, the weather very rarely plays a part. Oh, sure, you could have an ion storm in space, or a solar flare or two. Post-apocalyptic stories set on a ruined Earth do pose some weather-related problems for their characters—most often drought. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is an exception; it rains or snows constantly in the nuclear winter of his book, to the misery of his characters.

Occasionally characters leave their spaceships and go “dirtside” on an actual planet, where they are subject to that planet’s weather. But SFR writers are usually so enamored of the wonders of space that planetary weather is often the last thing on their minds. If the visuals are anything to go by (movies and TV shows), all the planets our characters are visiting are either vast, hot desert wastelands or vast, cold, desert wastelands. AVATAR is a notable exception. It is beautiful and full of life, but where is the weather? Couldn’t Jake and Neytiri have benefitted from a timely rainstorm?

The mines of Rura Penthe? Or maybe just Alaska.

Maybe our limited vision of planetary weather has been formed by the two screen giants of SF—STAR TREK and STAR WARS, both of which seem overly fond of desert planets. There’s a very good reason for this—deserts are easy to find and film in here on Earth. In TREK’s case, there were lots of desert film locations within easy distance of L.A. back in the Classic series days. I’m sure George Lucas thought the desert locations for Tattooine looked sufficiently exotic to be on some other planet. Or think of the ice fields of Rura Penthe, the prison planet Kirk and McCoy are sentenced to in STAR TREK VI—surely no place on Earth could be that harsh!

Actually Earth has some pretty spectacular places—and corresponding weather. We really have to put our minds to work to come up with something more astounding. Methane rain. Phosphorescent sand storms. Walls of lighting. Or maybe just a nice, sunny day that turns nasty in the way one does some places on Earth.

The details of setting can be more than just bulkheads and decking, stale air and food from a replicator. Spaceships can be very confining and, really, they are only good for getting our characters from one place to another unless the purpose is to write the SFR equivalent of a drawing room drama or mystery. Let the story—and the characters—get out and stretch their legs once in a while. They just might see something no one has ever seen before.

Cheers,

Donna