This month started with a scare. Our regular writer and Patagonia (the region, not the brand) resident Ricky Lanusse was caught in a wildfire. We all read or write about increased temperatures and climate catastrophe. But being personally confronted by the effects and threats of fire burning around you is something else altogether. In My Patagonian Backyard Is Burning, Ricky wrote “the flames rage in Brazo Tristeza, just 20 kilometers away. A place we know too well… a natural haven turned into a blazing inferno.”
I followed up with Ricky privately and he reassured me that the fire died down just before it reached his town — the rain arrived just in time. But Patagonia is about as close to the Antarctic as human civilisation gets. Heat and wildfires aren’t accustomed there. In fact, as he goes on to write in The Uninsurable Future, northwest Patagonia was previously thought to be a “climate haven”, because of its “high latitude and altitude to avoid the worst heatwaves, isolated from a stormy ocean coast, and with for distinctive seasons. But last winter, we were flooded with five months of record rainfall, followed by severe droughts and destructive wildfires.”
It’s an important reminder that, as the world heats, there aren’t climate winners and climate losers — we all lose, just to a lesser or greater degree. And every 0.1 degree of temperature rise or fall really counts.
George Dillard has similar questions on his mind when contemplating a box of doughnuts. As much as we’d all like it not to be the case, carbon emissions from human activity will never entirely cease. While we must reduce and reduce, we do have choices to be made over where and what we need to emit, and where we don’t. (Unsurprisingly, perhaps, George chose the nicest doughnuts.)
Take another example, the bicycle. Or Matt Traverso’s bicycle, to be precise. We all know that the humble bike is the best, lowest carbon form of road vehicle going. But it’s not zero carbon, with embodied manufacturing emissions, not to mention those of the steel/aluminium furnaces. Exactly how much carbon, and how long it would take to ‘pay off’, formed the basis of Matt’s article.
Our emissions are often closely linked to culture, even religion, too. February appears to be a contemplative kinda month, as Peter Borg was rudely awakened by fireworks in Malta, signalling yet another Saints day, which got him wondering about the The Environmental Impact of Fireworks (spoiler: it’s not good, and drone displays are way cooler, so let’s just all agree to switch to those). And Kenny Minker didn’t even get as far as looking up at the sky, but rather considered the worth of his balcony compost heap in Lima, Peru.
But forcing us to consider the full range of our planetary (and spatial) boundaries, came two pieces from new star writer (with I believe a 100% Boost rate on TNC!) Sílvia PM, PhD 🍂who used her training as a Palaeontologist to explain how her field is Using Fossils To Battle Climate Change — this has been one of our lead homepage stories all month. And later to ask, more alarmingly, Could Global Warming Lead To Catastrophic Freezing? I have to admit, having read about, researched, written about, and considered many a climate catastrophe, both present and projected — few are more scary than a collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). It has precedent, having happened just 12,000 years ago — a blink of an eye in a geological timeframe, even very late in the human evolution timeline. So this isn’t mere doom-mongering. But as we all plan, prepare and adapt to a warming climate, the idea of how we then adapt to temperatures cooling by 5–20°C is one that — and I don’t say this with any pride — I can’t bring myself to fully contemplate.
The solutions, however, remain boringly the same: reduce emissions which reduces global warming and reduces, ideally halts, the melting of the icecaps which dump the freshwater weakening the AMOC. So, as we were then — let’s concentrate on reducing emissions, pulling all the levers at our disposal, be they bicycles or doughnut choices.
And this month’s One From The Archive: As it’s still winter, and most people — including many environmentalists — still don’t realise that it’s a problem, educate yourself or others with Peter Knapp’s How bad is wood-burning? And why do people do it?
Until the green shots of March,
Tim Smedley, Editor, The New Climate.
