|
By the end of the century, the coolest months in tropical South America, Africa, and the Pacific are likely to be
<br />warmer than the warmest months at the end of the 20th century. Photo: Heartless Machine
<br />Our lungs need oxygen, but that is only a fraction of what we breathe. The fraction of carbon dioxide is growing: It just crossed 400 parts per
<br />million, and high -end estimates extrapolating from current trends suggest it will hit 1,000 ppm by 2100. At that concentration, compared to the air
<br />we breathe now, human cognitive ability declines by 21 percent.
<br />Other stuff in the hotter air is even scarier, with small increases in pollution capable of shortening life spans by ten years. The warmer the planet
<br />gets, the more ozone forms, and by mid - century, Americans will likely suffer a 70 percent increase in unhealthy ozone smog, the National Center
<br />for Atmospheric Research has projected. By 2090, as many as 2 billion people globally will be breathing air above the WHO "safe" level; one paper
<br />last month showed that, among other effects, a pregnant mother's exposure to ozone raises the child's risk of autism (as much as tenfold,
<br />combined with other environmental factors). Which does make you think again about the autism epidemic in West Hollywood.
<br />Already, more than 10,000 people die each day from the small particles emitted from fossil -fuel burning; each year, 339,000 people die from wildfire
<br />smoke, in part because climate change has extended forest -fire season (in the U.S., it's increased by 78 days since 1970). By 2050, according to
<br />the U.S. Forts s4 Service, wildfires will be twice as destructive as they are today; in some places, the area burned could grow fivefold. What worries
<br />people even more is the effect that would have on emissions, especially when the fires ravage forests arising out of peat. Peatland fires in
<br />Indonesia in 1997, for instance, added to the global CO2 release by up to 40 percent, and more burning only means more warming only means
<br />more burning. There is also the terrifying possibility that rain forests like the Amazon, which in 2010 suffered its second "hundred -year drought" in
<br />the space of five years, could dry out enough to become vulnerable to these kinds of devastating, rolling forest fires — which would not only expel
<br />enormous amounts of carbon into the atmosphere but also shrink the size of the forest. That is especially bad because the Amazon alone provides
<br />20 percent of our oxygen.
<br />Then there are the more familiar forms of pollution. In 2013, melting Arctic ice remodeled Asian weather patterns, depriving industrial China of the
<br />natural ventilation systems it had come to depend on, which blanketed much of the country's north in an unbreathable smog. Literally unbreathable.
<br />A metric called the Air Quality Index categorizes the risks and tops out at the 301 -to -500 range, warning of "serious aggravation of heart or lung
<br />disease and premature mortality in persons with cardiopulmonary disease and the elderly" and, for all others, "serious risk of respiratory effects "; at
<br />that level, "everyone should avoid all outdoor exertion." The Chinese "airpocalypse" of 2013 peaked at what would have been an Air Quality Index
<br />of over 800. That year, smog was responsible for a third of all deaths in the country.
<br />V7. Perpetual War
<br />The violence baked into heat.
<br />Climatologists are very careful when talking about Syria. They want you to know that while climate change did produce a drought that contributed
<br />to civil war, it is not exactly fair to saythat the conflict is the result of warming; next door, for instance, Lebanon suffered the same crop failures. But
<br />researchers like Marshall Burke and Solomon Hsiang have managed to quantify some of the non - obvious relationships between temperature and
<br />violence: For every half- degree of warming, they say, societies will see between a 10 and 20 percent increase in the likelihood of armed conflict. In
<br />climate science, nothing is simple, but the arithmetic is harrowing: A planet five degrees warmer would have at least half again as many wars as we
<br />do today. Overall, social conflict could more than double this century.
<br />This is one reason that, as nearly every climate scientist I spoke to pointed out, the U.S. military is obsessed with climate change: The drowning of
<br />all American Navy bases by sea -level rise is trouble enough, but being the world's policeman is quite a bit harder when the crime rate doubles. Of
<br />course, it's not just Syria where climate has contributed to conflict. Some speculate that the elevated level of strife across the Middle East over the
<br />past generation reflects the pressures of global warming — a hypothesis all the more cruel considering that warming began accelerating when the
<br />industrialized world extracted and then burned the region's oil.
<br />What accounts for the relationship between climate and conflict? Some of it comes down to agriculture and economics; a lot has to do with forced
<br />migration, already at a record high, with at least 65 million displaced people wandering the planet right now. But there is also the simple fact of
<br />individual irritability. Heat increases municipal crime rates, and swearing on social media, and the likelihood that a major - league pitcher, coming to
<br />the mound after his teammate has been hit by a pitch, will hit an opposing batter in retaliation. And the arrival of air - conditioning in the developed
<br />world, in the middle of the past century, did little to solve the problem of the summer crime wave.
<br />
|