THE CLIMATASTROPHE

"Record-breaking," and "unseasonable" are now obsolete terms in the face of frequent wildfires, escalating arctic blasts, extreme flooding, fatal heat waves, devastating droughts, derechos, El Niños, thawing permafrost, nitrous oxide plumes, stifling heat domes, atmospheric rivers, extreme winds & power outages, algae blooms, polar vertices, coral reef bleaching, and more powerful thunderstorms, tornadoes and hurricanes. We've hit the steep part of the curve.

Question 1. How long have we known? 19th century scientists discovered that N2 and O2 did not absorb infrared radiation called, at that time, "dark radiation." In 1859, before the Civil War, John Tyndall demonstrated how CO2 absorbs heat energy, in simple experiments easily duplicated in a high school science class. How this would bring on global warming was calculated by Svante Arrhenius in 1896. The basic facts were understood well enough that the March 1912 issue of Popular Mechanics wrote “The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the Earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries.” (Or one!) NASA's James Hansen testified about climate to Congress in the mid-80s. I became more concerned after reading John Houghton's Global Warming: The Briefing (Oxford University) in 1993 and The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World out of Order by Laurie Garrett in 1994. https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Plague-Emerging-Diseases-Balance-ebook/dp/B005FGR6RO Pentagon warnings, V.P. Al Gore, TED talks (one by Bill Gates), all were ignored for political reasons because thorough preparedness would have cost a lot of money. Ironic, with billion-dollar disasters now becoming common, making President Biden's 'Green New Deal' look like a bargain.          

Question 2. How does it work? When high energy sunlight reaches the surface of the Earth, some of it is absorbed and warms the surface. After sunset, notice how bricks feel warm but don't glow; that's because they're emitting in the invisible infrared. Because the Earth's surface is cooler than the sun, it radiates energy back at longer wavelengths than the sun, peaking in the infrared at about 10µm. The atmosphere absorbs these longer wavelengths more effectively than it does the shorter wavelengths from the sun. The absorption of this long wave radiant energy warms the atmosphere.  Increased energy in the atmosphere means increased energy in weather events. In 1979 carbon isotopes in the CO2 clinched it, positively identifying the escalating CO2 as coming from fossil fuels. Reducing greenhouse gases should be mankind's highest priority.

Question 3. What's the consensus? EVERY professional scientific organization understands what's happening and how big a threat it is: Our prestigious National Academies, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Chemical Society, the American Geophysical Union, the American Meteorological Society, the American Statistical Association, the Ecological Society of America, the Geological Society of America and many more; a solid consensus. In April 2007 a Pentagon report, National Security and the Threat of Climate Change, stated that “worldwide climate change threatens to create sustained natural and humanitarian disasters ... the chaos that results can be an incubator of civil strife, genocide and the growth of terrorism.” For those who want more, go to a real science website: http://www.realclimate.org/  Climate projections often include three scenarios; best case, worst case and middle. Most of what we’ve seen over the past decades (arctic warming, for example) has fallen into the worst-case categories. How accurate are the projections? “Of the 17 climate change models examined, 14 were quite accurate in predicting global warming’s effects. The researchers plugged real emissions levels into the models, and predictions matched what had actually happened.” — weather.com     (cont.)

Question 4. Who denies it? a) From ignorance: Trump et alia.  b) For money: By the 1970s, when Exxon and the others came to realize what was happening, they ignored recommendations for change and instead chose the same path the tobacco industry had; a misinformation campaign to cloud the issue and spread doubt (using the same three "scientists for hire" the tobacco giants had used). And it worked. For decades. Harvard historian of science Naomi Oreskes reviewed oil company documents dating back to 1977, including peer-reviewed scientific papers, internal documents, company pamphlets, conference materials and books, and reported the results : Exxon knew but lied. Her book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7799004-merchants-of-doubt

Question 5: How bad will it get? The book to read (for the few who still read books instead of gorging on Twitter/X, 4Chan, Fox, Breitbart, etc.) is Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency by Mark Lynas. Reviewed by veteran environmentalist Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org [target 350 ppm CO2 limit -already surpassed]. Excerpts from his review: A survey of the damage done at one degree is impressive and unsettling, especially since in almost every case it exceeds what scientists would have predicted thirty years ago. (Scientists, it turns out, are by nature cautious.) Lynas offers a planetary tour of the current carnage, ranging from Greenland (where melt rates are already at the level once predicted for 2070); to the world’s forests (across the planet, fire season has increased in duration); to urban areas in Asia and the Middle East, which in the last few summers have seen the highest reliably recorded temperatures on Earth, approaching 54 degrees Celsius, or 130 degrees Fahrenheit. It is a one-degree world that has seen a girdle of bleached coral across the tropics—a 90 percent collapse along the Great Barrier Reef, the planet’s largest living structure—and the appalling scenes from Australia in December [2019], as thousands of people waded into the ocean at resort towns to escape the firestorms barreling down from the hills. ... at four degrees: advanced industrial civilization, with its constantly increasing levels of material consumption, energy use and living standards—the system that we call modernity…is tottering. In places like Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Arkansas, peak temperatures each year will be hotter than the 120+ one now finds in Death Valley, and three quarters of the globe’s population will be exposed to deadly heat more than 20 days per year. In New York, the number will be fifty days; in Jakarta, 365. A belt of uninhabitability will run through the Middle East, most of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and eastern China; expanding deserts will consume whole countries from Iraq to Botswana. Entire regions of Africa and Australia and the United States, parts of South America north of Patagonia, and Asia south of Siberia would be rendered uninhabitable by direct heat, desertification, and flooding. At six degrees of warming, it's simply apocalyptic! The living will envy the dead."  (Possible exception: modern Robber Barons in fortified refuges in the Arctic?)

Question 6: What can we do? a) "Business as usual" is suicidal. To get through what has already begun, every slice of Socolow's Wedge will need to be pursued, like it or not:   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_stabilization_wedge  b) There's a gigantic fusion reactor in the sky, pumping out seven megawatts per square mile. Solar panels 10 x 100 miles plus one square mile of battery storage = the power requirements of the entire United States.  Data: https://inovateus.com/how-many-square-miles-of-solar-panels-would-it-take-to-power-the-u-s-its-smaller-than-you-think/ c) Hold those responsible accountable for their actions? Is denial of the science that's vital to survival a crime? A court case:  https://www.omaha.com/eedition/sunrise/articles/report-says-exxonmobil-misled-public-for-decades/article_a3c96262-12aa-578d-8631-9d9f0dc33018.html Going beyond that is problematic, but NASA's James Hansen, who blew the whistle decades ago, once suggested in his frustration, that climate-science denial should be considered a crime against humanity. Prosecution is now being seriously considered: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jun/30/climate-crisis-crime-fossil-fuels-environment The case has even been developed into a book: https://mahb.stanford.edu/library-item/unprecedented-crime-climate-science-denial-game-changers-survival/

-Jim Bechtel, for Earth Day April 2026, Omaha www.reason.ws