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Jim__

(14,045 posts)
Thu Feb 14, 2019, 03:03 PM Feb 2019

"Two great tides are converging on the world's cities"

A review of 4 books in the February 7th issue of the London Review of Books:

Firestorm: How Wildfire Will Shape Our Future by Edward Struzik

BuyExtreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change by Ashley Dawson

Seeds on Ice: Svalbard and the Global Seed Vault by Cary Fowler

Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration and Homeland Security by Todd Miller

The review is by an American who lived in Seattle until his wife registered for nursing school in Ashland, Oregon. They have 2 young sons, and when they moved to Ashland, the husband and the 2 sons had to move somewhere else for the summer. Ashland is filled with smoke for the entire summer - every summer now. The people who live there wear gas masks all summer long. Some of the devastating effects of climate change are already here.

A short excerpt:

...

There were four books in the box. They are very different from one another, but as a whole they represent a generational break with the climate change books before them. This is because not one of them is strictly about the topic at hand. Not one of them bothers to argue that climate change is real. Not one bothers to explain how societies can work to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Not one gets hung up on atmospheric science or computer models or the Paris Agreement. Instead, they simply take for granted that temperatures will rise and that the world as we know it will soon be fundamentally altered. The migration scholar writes about migration and the seed scientist about seeds and the ecosocialist about urban capitalism, but climate change – the biggest, most pervasive ongoing event in the world – is always present in the background. This is by necessity. Climate change is and will be everywhere. It doesn’t stand apart from our daily existence, not any more.

Edward Struzik’s Firestorm is about the coming age of ‘megafires’ – wildfires covering an area of 100,000 acres or more. The phenomenon isn’t new, but megafires now occur with unprecedented frequency, and are uprooting more and more people from their homes. In Canada, the average area affected annually has doubled since global temperatures began their abrupt rise in the 1970s, and it is likely to double again by 2050. Quoting a favourite scientist, Mike Flannigan, Struzik lays out the three simple reasons for this. First, warmer temperatures mean drier forests. Second, warmer temperatures mean more lightning strikes. Third, warmer temperatures mean longer fire seasons. Struzik centres his story on the Horse River Fire, also known as the ‘Beast’, which struck Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada’s tar-sands capital, in 2016. It spread across 1.5 million acres, destroyed 2500 homes and 12,000 vehicles, and forced 88,000 residents to flee. The firestorm was of such ferocity it created its own weather patterns, including lightning strikes that set off smaller fires to herald its approach. The irony of the fire’s location wasn’t lost on Struzik. ‘Behind us glowed the lights of fossil fuel-driven human activity,’ he wrote of a night spent in the burned-out forest not far from the site of the $7.3 billion tar-sands project, ‘emitting greenhouse gases that are warming the climate and triggering atmospheric disturbances, driving wildfire to burn bigger, faster, hotter, and more often.’

Struzik describes how Fort McMurray residents escaped from the Beast while bureaucrats were still fighting over how to respond; dives into the scientific mystery of the fire’s lightning-producing pyrocumulonimbus clouds, or pyroCbs; describes how politics have caused forest managers to retreat from the practice of controlled burning, allowing forests to become choked with unburned fuel; explains how drought and invasive beetles have made trees more susceptible to fire; explores the way people’s encroachment on woodland has made more homes susceptible to fire; and underscores the fact that water supplies which may already be facing climate stress are further threatened through contamination by wildfires. He dedicates an entire chapter – bless him – to the dangers unsuspecting people face from smoke inhalation from distant fires. But when the book concludes with a quiet call for better evacuation planning and more research – in both Canada and the United States federal budgets go overwhelmingly to firefighting rather than fire science – the reader is left with an uncomfortable realisation: it’s too late. From here on it’s triage. Some future fires may be allowed to burn so as to clear out accumulated fuel, and some may be suppressed as they are today, even if this increases the risk of later megafire. Either way, our forests will burn.

This human knack for increasing long-term risk by trying to diminish it in the short term doesn’t apply only to fires. In Extreme Cities, Ashley Dawson, a New York-based activist and scholar of postcolonialism, argues persuasively that cities are becoming ground zero for climate change. They are home to most of the world’s people and the source of most of its emissions. We have built our megacities – 13 of the largest twenty are ports – in sinking river deltas. Half of the world’s population already lives close to the sea, and now more people, fleeing rural drought or poverty, are moving there. ‘Two great tides are converging on the world’s cities,’ Dawson writes. ‘The first of these is a human tide. In 2007, humanity became a predominantly city-dwelling species.’ The second tide, of course, is the literal one: the rising seas, which may be metres higher by the end of the century.

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"Two great tides are converging on the world's cities" (Original Post) Jim__ Feb 2019 OP
To the young Cartoonist Feb 2019 #1
I am so glad I chose to not have kids... BigmanPigman Feb 2019 #2

Cartoonist

(7,298 posts)
1. To the young
Thu Feb 14, 2019, 03:17 PM
Feb 2019

I'm sorry.

I grew up in a beautiful world. I made my own contribution to global warming by driving a car almost every day since high school. I'm sorry for what I'm leaving you.

BigmanPigman

(51,432 posts)
2. I am so glad I chose to not have kids...
Thu Feb 14, 2019, 04:43 PM
Feb 2019

I would feel even more guilty for what humans have done than I already do.

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