Several years ago, when the mass media first caught onto the idea that global warming (or “climate change”) might be dangerous, this assertion was nearly always phrased in the future tense. There was talk of “tipping points,” a future, it was said when the progressive nature of warming would allow no turning back.
In 2024, however, more than at any other time, tipping points weren’t mentioned as something that might trouble us at some future time. Climatically speaking, the former future has arrived. World temperatures had reached new highs for ten years in a row, and all sorts of violent weather had become so ordinary that a number of non-scientists are taking them for “normal.” In this class, there has been that veteran climate denier Donald John Trump, who, in the Oval Office or on the stump, brags about how smart he is. He has always had one four-letter word for temperatures racing upward: “HOAX.” Who needs science when we have Donald Trump as our climate doctor?
It is very likely that Trump was not listening as the new year dawned when a large number of climate-watching organizations provided data strongly indicating that 2024 had been the hottest year on record—again. This was not the hottest year since measurable records had been kept or the thermometer invented. Those records have been left in the ashes. It was likely the hottest year since humans left footprints on the Earth – perhaps 125,000 years ago. Not only that, but 2024’s temperatures exceeded the 1.5 C. maximum set by the Paris Accord eight years ago, which was supposed to have been the point at which the temperature curve had to stop rising if we were to turn back the march to catastrophe.
“Climate-change alarm bells have been ringing almost constantly, which may be causing the public to become numb to the urgency, like police sirens in New York City,” Woodwell Climate Research Center’s Jennifer Francis,” told Seth Borenstein, veteran climate reporter with the Associated Press. “In the case of the climate,” said Francis, “The alarm bells are getting louder.” Last year, 27 weather disasters in the United States caused $1 billion in damage each, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) records. The cost of these added up to $182.7 billion. Hurricane Helene alone cost $79.6 billion. In the 1980s, the United States had one million-dollar weather disaster every four months. In the fall of 2024, that average was one every three weeks: a factor of about six to one, Texas Tech climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe told Borenstein via email.
The numbers may be numbing, but they also can indicate crisis in the lives of human beings, animals, and plants. As I was writing this, large parts of California’s massive valley in and around Los Angeles were going up in flames. Each home, business, or other human endeavor destroyed in these fires represents the hopes and dreams of many people. In this case, the significant contribution of climate change is wind—searing blasts usually downslope from the east as strong as 100 miles an hour, a hurricane of embers jumping from structure to structure, forest to forest.
A 100-mile-an-hour Santa Ana is very unusual in Southern California, as are wildfires in January. That’s usually the rainy season. The dry season is generally in the summer. This year, the area had had almost a year-long drought. As I read the reports of the searing out-of-season fires, I kept turning to the words of Robert Frost’s “Fire and Ice” in my mind. “Wildfires are burning hotter and moving faster. Storms are getting bigger and carrying more moisture. Soaring temperatures worldwide are leading to heat waves and drought,” wrote David Gelles and Austyn Gaffney in The New York Times.
The violence of extreme heat (at times before or after intense rainfall) kills people and destroys their homes and businesses with little respite. Several thousand Muslim pilgrims died in Saudi Arabia last summer. In the United States, heat-related deaths set records as temperatures rose. “We are in a new era now,” former U.S. Vice President Al Gore told Gelles and Gaffney. Gore has warned of climate change’s dangers since at least the 1980s. At one point, he mounted a ladder during a film he made on the subject to illustrate how rapidly the proportion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been rising in recent times.
Throughout most of humankind’s tenancy on the Earth, 180 parts per million of carbon dioxide have indicated an ice age, and 280 p.p.m. a blistering, centuries-long heat wave. This year, the proportion of CO2 will certainly break through 425 p.p.m. Thermal inertia delays the effects of heat or cold indicated by these numbers for 50 to 100 years —enough of a difference to take us back roughly to the invention of the Model T.
Extending the record even further with ice cores, carbon dioxide concentrations are the highest in at least 800,000 years.
“We’re going to continue to have records be broken because the baseline temperature is constantly moving up,” said Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City. “The cause of that warming trend over the last 50 to 60 years is dominated by our changes to greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide and methane,” Schmidt said.
There’s something about being rich that seems to make certain people feel as if they are experts on the future of the planet. We have already heard from Donald Trump in this regard, over and over with nauseous simplicity. Another self-proclaimed expert seems to be Elon Musk, now a multi-billionaire campaign buddy of Trump, who said in the Times piece quoted above that “Climate change is real, just much slower than the alarmists claim.”
To Musk, the loss of homes in the hundreds of thousands to fire is a result of “non-sensical regulation” and “bad governance”—none of this having anything to do (in his published statements) with carbon dioxide and methane levels, intense drought, or 100-mile per hour winds lighting up embers on relative humidity of 5 to 10 percent. Nor is it even about controlling greenhouse gas emissions, including their rising levels. In the real world, Misters Trump and Musk et al., The future has arrived, with the ultra-rich, self-endowed experts on everything mouthing cliches.
Bruce E. Johansen has written and published several books on this climate change during the past 25 years, the most recent of which will be Nationalism and Nature: War and Warming, due out in October from Springer publishers in Frankfurt, Germany.
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