Whiplash

Like many people, I've been watching the news, photographs, and video footage coming in from the fires in the Los Angeles region with feelings of absolute horror.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Toastt21, PalisadesFire fromDowntown, CC BY-SA 4.0]

As of the time of this writing, ten people have died, 34,000 acres have burned, and 200,000 people are under mandatory evacuation orders.  At least ten thousand structures -- homes and businesses -- have burned to the ground.  And while the high winds that have been driving the spread of the wildfires and making fighting them difficult to impossible are supposed to moderate this weekend, meteorologists have predicted them to increase again early next week.

Because there's no human tragedy so heartwrenching that Donald Trump won't use it to score political points, he's gone on Truth Social repeatedly in the last couple of days to say the whole thing is Governor Gavin "Newscum"'s fault, presumably for not raking the forests or going up to Canada to turn on the "very large faucet" that is holding back all the water from the western half of the United States.  Not a word of empathy for the people who've had their homes and their livelihoods destroyed, not a mention of the scale of this catastrophe.

It's what we've come to expect from leaders who have zero compassion and no benchmarks for conduct except for profit, cronyism, and revenge.

Note, too, that there's been no mention that the ultimate cause of this disaster is anthropogenic climate change.  No, gotta find a way that the Democrats are to blame, even though we've been the ones who have been warning about this for years.  In fact, just this week a study was published in the journal National Review of the Earth and the Environment that directly attributes the risk of devastating fire outbreaks to climate change -- more specifically, to a phenomenon called hydroclimate whiplash.

One of the results of global warming that is hard to get people to understand is that it isn't uniform.  The entire world isn't going to gradually slide into becoming a tropical rain forest.  The polar vortex phenomenon we've seen here in the northeastern United States over the last few years is actually one of the predictions of climate change models; the overall warming of the Earth causes a weakening of the polar jet stream, causing it to meander like a river crossing a flat plain.  Loops of the jet stream are pushed south, and those meanders allow icy polar air to move much farther south than normal.  So these deep cold snaps are actually caused by anthropogenic climate change; they're not an argument against it.

Likewise, rainfall and snowfall patterns aren't going to move uniformly in one direction, they're expected to fluctuate wildly.  This is hydroclimate whiplash, and is at the root of the Los Angeles fires.  The rainy season in early 2024 in southern California was abnormally wet (in fact, there were multiple damaging mudslides caused by what are called "atmospheric rivers" dumping huge quantities of rain and snow).  This triggered explosive growth in fast-growing plants like grasses and annual and perennial weeds.  The summer that followed was abnormally dry, and the winter 2024-2025 rainy season basically hasn't happened yet.  So you had what amounted to a tinder box of dried-up plants, just waiting for a spark to start the conflagration.

"The global consequences of hydroclimate whiplash include not only floods and droughts, but the heightened danger of whipsawing between the two, including the bloom-and-burn cycle of overwatered then overdried brush, and landslides on oversaturated hillsides where recent fires removed plants with roots to knit the soil and slurp up rainfall," said Daniel Swain, climatologist with UCLA, who co-authored the study.  "Every fraction of a degree of warming speeds the growing destructive power of the transitions."

You won't hear a word of this from Donald Trump and his cronies, of course.  Not while they have Joe Biden and Gavin Newsom to blame, and certainly not as long as the GOP is in the pockets of the fossil fuels industry.  Trump's pronouncements on the wildfires have contained, to quote CNN's Daniel Dale, a "staggering amount of wrongness," but I guess now we're back to living in the "alternative facts" world we were in from 2016 to 2020.

Since we've now lost our opportunity here in the United States to put the brakes on fossil fuel use, at least for the next four years, look for more extremes to come.  We can expect bigger storms, more heat waves and polar vortexes, more atmospheric rivers and catastrophic droughts.  We tried to warn people; hell, I've been writing about this topic here for fifteen years, and was discussing it in my classes three decades ago.

Not that the people in charge were listening.  As Upton Sinclair put it, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

So there's nothing we can do now but to put pressure on legislators -- frustrating though that's likely to be in the current political climate -- and prepare our own selves for weathering the storms, literal and figurative.  Find places to donate to help those displaced by the fires, some of whom have lost everything.  (Here's just one of many options.)  

Most importantly to the bigger picture: keep speaking up against the lies coming from Trump and his allies.  We can't let misinformation shout more loudly than the truth.

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NEW!  We've updated our website, and now -- in addition to checking out my books and the amazing art by my wife, Carol Bloomgarden, you can also buy some really cool Skeptophilia-themed gear!  Just go to the website and click on the link at the bottom, where you can support your favorite blog by ordering t-shirts, hoodies, mugs, bumper stickers, and tote bags, all designed by Carol!

Take a look!  Plato would approve.

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The weather report

Anyone who paid attention in ninth grade Earth Science class knows that climate and weather are not the same thing.

This, of course, means that we should be scrutinizing the high school transcripts of Donald Trump and the majority of his administration, because without fail you can count on a sneering comment about there being no such thing as anthropogenic climate change every time it snows in Buffalo.

The difference isn't even that hard to understand.  Climate is what you expect to get, weather is what you actually get.  Put more scientifically, climate is the overall averages and trends in a geographical region, and weather is the conditions that occur in a place at a particular time.  So a hot day no more proves the reality of climate change than a cold day disproves it; it's the changes of the average conditions over time that demonstrate to anyone with an IQ larger than their shoe size that something is going drastically wrong with the global climate, and that our penchant for burning fossil fuels is largely the cause.

Well, we might have to amend that last paragraph.  Because a paper that came out last week in Nature has shown pretty conclusively that you can detect the fingerprint of climate change in the weather -- if you look at a large enough sampling on a particular day.

In "Climate Change Now Detectable from Any Single Day of Weather at Global Scale," climatologists Sebastian Sippel, Nicolai Meinshausen, Erich M. Fischer, Enikő Székely, and Reto Knutti, of the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science of ETH Zürich decided to look at the assumptions implicit in Donald Trump's incessant tweeting every time there's a hard frost that climate change doesn't exist, and see if it really is possible to see the effects of climate change on a small scale.

And terrifyingly, it turns out that it is.

The authors write:

For generations, climate scientists have educated the public that ‘weather is not climate’, and climate change has been framed as the change in the distribution of weather that slowly emerges from large variability over decades.  However, weather when considered globally is now in uncharted territory.  Here we show that on the basis of a single day of globally observed temperature and moisture, we detect the fingerprint of externally driven climate change, and conclude that Earth as a whole is warming.  Our detection approach invokes statistical learning and climate model simulations to encapsulate the relationship between spatial patterns of daily temperature and humidity, and key climate change metrics such as annual global mean temperature or Earth’s energy imbalance.  Observations are projected onto this relationship to detect climate change.  The fingerprint of climate change is detected from any single day in the observed global record since early 2012, and since 1999 on the basis of a year of data.  Detection is robust even when ignoring the long-term global warming trend.  This complements traditional climate change detection, but also opens broader perspectives for the communication of regional weather events, modifying the climate change narrative: while changes in weather locally are emerging over decades, global climate change is now detected instantaneously.

So Trump's method of "look out of the window and check what the weather's like today" turns out to prove exactly the opposite of what he'd like everyone to believe.

I am simultaneously appalled and fascinated by the fact that there are still people who doubt anthropogenic climate change.  To start with, there is a universal consensus amongst the climatologists (i.e., the people who know what the hell they're talking about) that man-made global warming is a reality.  Note, by the way, that the scientists have always erred on the cautious side; back when I started my teaching career in the 1980s, the truthful stance was that there was suspicion that anthropogenic climate change was happening, but very few scientists were willing to state it with certainty.

Now?  There's hardly a dissenting voice, with the exception of the "scientists" at the Heartland Institute, who coincidentally get their paychecks from the petroleum industry.

Hmm, I wonder why they're still arguing against it?  Funny thing, that.

But even more persuasive than the scientists -- after all, we're not known as a species for trusting the experts when the experts are saying something inconvenient -- there's the evidence of our own eyes.  In my own home of upstate New York, stop by our local coffee shop any morning you like and ask one of the old-timers if winters now are as bad as what they remember as a child.  One and all, they'll tell you about snowstorms and blizzards and so on, the last serious one of which happened back in 1993.  Yeah, we've had snowfalls since then -- this is the Northeast, after all -- but if you look back through the meteorological records from the early to mid 20th century, there is no question that we've trended toward milder winters.

Then there are the summertime droughts and heat waves, the most extreme of which is happening right now in Australia.  Large parts of Australia are currently burning to a crisp in the worst and most widespread series of wildfires in human history.  Whole towns are being evacuated, and in some places the only safety people have found is piling their family members, pets, and belongings onto boats and waiting out the fires offshore.  The latest estimates are that 12.3 million acres have been charred in the last few months, and that half a billion wild animals have died.  Given the threatened status of a great many of Australia's endemic species, the fact is that we might be witnessing in a few months the simultaneous extinction of dozens of endangered plants and animals.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

But Trump and his administration, and their media mouthpieces at Fox News, have continued to feed people the lie that everything's okay, that we can continue polluting and burning gasoline and coal without any repercussions whatsoever.  Deregulate everything has become the battle cry.  Industry, they say, will regulate itself, no need to worry.

Because that worked out so well in the 1950s and 1960s, when the air in big cities was barely breathable, and there was so much industrial waste in the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio that it caught fire not once but thirteen times.

The scientists, and concerned laypeople like myself, have been screaming "Will you people please wake up and do something!" for years now, to seemingly little effect.  "Everything's fine" is a comforting lie, especially since rejecting it means putting a crimp in our generally lavish lifestyles.

The problem is, the natural world has a nasty way of having the last word.  We often forget that there is no reason whatsoever that we couldn't completely wipe ourselves out, either through accident or neglect or outright willful fuckery, or some combination thereof.  For my kids' sake I hope we as a species get pulled up short in the very near future and come together to work toward a solution, because my sense is that time is short.  There comes a point when an avalanche has started and no power on Earth can stop it.  I just hope we're not there yet.

But such a point definitely exists, whether it's behind us or ahead of us.  And that by itself should scare the absolute shit out of every citizen of this Earth.

Maybe you still find yourself shrugging and saying, "Meh."  If so, you should shut off Fox News (permanently) and read a scientific paper or two.  Start with the Sippel et al. study I linked above.

If that doesn't convince you, I don't know what would.

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This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is simultaneously one of the most dismal books I've ever read, and one of the funniest; Tom Phillips's wonderful Humans: A Brief History of How We Fucked It All Up.

I picked up a copy of it at the wonderful book store The Strand when I was in Manhattan last week, and finished it in three days flat (and I'm not a fast reader).  To illustrate why, here's a quick passage that'll give you a flavor of it:

Humans see patterns in the world, we can communicate this to other humans and we have the capacity to imagine futures that don't yet exist: how if we just changed this thing, then that thing would happen, and the world would be a slightly better place. 

The only trouble is... well, we're not terribly good at any of those things.  Any honest assessment of humanity's previous performance on those fronts reads like a particularly brutal annual review from a boss who hates you.  We imagine patterns where they don't exist.  Our communication skills are, uh, sometimes lacking.  And we have an extraordinarily poor track record of failing to realize that changing this thing will also lead to the other thing, and that even worse thing, and oh God no now this thing is happening how do we stop it.

Phillips's clear-eyed look at our own unfortunate history is kept from sinking under its own weight by a sparkling wit, calling our foibles into humorous focus but simultaneously sounding the call that "Okay, guys, it's time to pay attention."  Stupidity, they say, consists of doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results; Phillips's wonderful book points out how crucial that realization is -- and how we need to get up off our asses and, for god's sake, do something.

And you -- and everyone else -- should start by reading this book.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The tipping point

There's a common comment from climate change deniers that I'm sick unto death of, and it usually takes the form of something like "the Earth's climate has had ups and downs in the past, and life has gone along just fine."

First, it's the pure ignorance of this attitude that gets me.  If you did ten minutes' worth of research online, you'd find that a number of these "ups and downs" coincided with mass extinctions.  Life survived, yes, but dramatic losses in biodiversity and overall population numbers hardly constitutes "getting along just fine."  (In fact, the largest mass extinction ever -- the Permian-Triassic Extinction, which wiped out an estimated 96% of marine species and 65% of terrestrial species -- was coincident with a huge spike in temperature and atmospheric carbon dioxide, thought to have been triggered by a colossal volcanic eruption.)

But second, and honestly worse, is the blithe attitude that we can continue doing whatever we want to the environment and face no consequences whatsoever.  This raises entitlement to the level of an art form; apparently, we humans occupy such an exalted niche that no matter what we do, the rest of nature is magically going to make sure we not only survive, but thrive.

Even the most diehard deniers, however, are getting some serious hints that their determination to ignore science is not working out so well.  First of all, we have the fires in the Amazon, which have reached unprecedented levels in Brazil, with 74,000 acres burned to the ground already.  The cause is twofold -- the natural dry season, and the incomprehensible policy by Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro of recommending large-scale slash-and-burn to "encourage agriculture."  The problem is larger in scale than just South America, however.  Environmental scientist Jonathan Foley explained why in an interview with Science News:

Some computer models... show a hypothetical scenario that when we clear rainforest, it starts to almost immediately warm up and dry out the atmosphere nearby.  When we stand in a forest, it feels cool and moist.  But when you clear-cut large areas of the forest, the air right around you gets hotter and drier, and it affects even rainfall patterns.  The worry is if you start clear-cutting more of the Amazon, in theory, a tipping point could be reached where the rest of the forest dries out, too. 

If that happens, the idea is that the Amazon could flip suddenly from being a rainforest to being a dry savanna-like ecosystem.  We’re not absolutely certain about it, but even that theoretical possibility is kind of terrifying...  Globally, about 10 to 15 percent of our CO2 emissions comes from deforestation.  If this is going back up again in Brazil, that’s going to make climate change even worse.

The only amendment that needs to be made to Foley's statement is his use of the word "if" in the last sentence.

Smoke from the 2019 Amazonian wildfires [Image is in the Public Domain, courtesy of NASA]

The other piece of alarming information this week comes from some research done at Stockholm University that firmed up a link between the salinity of the North Atlantic and climate throughout the world.  The team, made up of David K. Hutchinson, Helen K. Coxall, Matt OʹRegan, Johan Nilsson, Rodrigo Caballero, and Agatha M. de Boer, were studying the Eocene-Oligocene Transition (EOT), which occurred 34 million years ago and involved a shift from a "hothouse" to "icehouse" climate.  

The authors write:

The Eocene–Oligocene transition (EOT), ~34 Ma ago, marked a major shift in global climate towards colder and drier conditions and the formation of the first Antarctic ice sheets.  A gradual decrease in CO2 is thought to be the primary driver of the transition, causing long-term cooling and increasing seasonality through the Eocene, culminating in the glaciation of Antarctica.  Deep water circulation proxies suggest that the EOT, including the preceding 1 Myr, also marked either the onset or strengthening of an Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC).

Catch that?  An event occurring the North Atlantic is the probable trigger for the formation of the Antarctic Ice Sheet, and a radical change in Earth's climate -- and, unsurprisingly, a massive extinction that wiped out 20% of the Earth's species (large mammals were the hardest hit).

What Hutchinson and his team showed is that the likely cause of this transition was the closing of a oceanic channel between the Arctic Ocean and the North Atlantic.  The Arctic Ocean at that time had very low salinity (something the team demonstrated using the species of algae that show up in the fossil record from that time and place).  As long as the channel was open, fresh water flooded into the North Atlantic, keeping the salinity of the surface water low.  When the channel closed due to tectonic movement, the salinity of the surface of the North Atlantic spiked.  Saline water is more dense than fresh water, so this surface water began to sink, kicking off the "North Atlantic Thermohaline Circulation" and (more germane to our discussion here) drawing down dissolved carbon dioxide by the metric ton.

The result: a drastic drop in temperature, Antarctica becoming an ice-covered wasteland, and a mass extinction worldwide.

How anyone can read this and not be freaking out over the spike in carbon dioxide we've seen in the last hundred years -- that appears to be the fastest carbon dioxide concentration change anywhere in the geological record -- is beyond me.  There's no doubt that there's a tipping point, as the Eocene-Oligocene Transition shows.  The only question is where that tipping point is -- and whether we've already passed it.

What's driving it all is money.  Altering our lifestyle, protecting the rain forests, and divesting ourselves from fossil fuels all require that we make sacrifices ourselves, but more importantly, that we end the chokehold the fossil fuels industry has on our elected officials.  Of course the politicians don't want anyone to understand and accept climate science, because that would mean cutting off one of their biggest sources of donations -- the petrochemical industry.

It is fitting to end with a quote from Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."  The problem is, here what we're jeopardizing is not simply someone's salary, but the long-term habitability of the Earth.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is about a subject near and dear to my heart; the possibility of intelligent extraterrestrial life.  In The Three-Body Problem, Chinese science fiction writer Cixin Liu takes an interesting angle on this question; if intelligent life were discovered in the universe -- maybe if it even gave us a visit -- how would humans react?

Liu examines the impact of finding we're not alone in the cosmos from political, social, and religious perspectives, and doesn't engage in any pollyanna-ish assumptions that we'll all be hunky-dory and ascend to the next plane of existence.  What he does think might happen, though, makes for fascinating reading, and leaves you pondering our place in the universe for days after you turn over the last page.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Gays, god, and forest fires

Many of you have undoubtedly been following the news of the horrific wildfires, last week in Colorado and this week in Arizona.  Thus far these fires have cost millions of dollars in damages and at least 21 lives, 19 of whom were members of an elite firefighting team who died this weekend in a blaze near Phoenix.

These fires are thought to have multiple causes.  The southwest saw record or near-record temperatures last week, coupled with low rainfall.  Some people also attribute the severity of the fires, especially in Colorado, to the population explosion of the pine bark beetle, which has killed huge stands of ponderosa pines all through the Rocky Mountains.  But in so attributing the fires to these reasons, people are ignoring the role of the most powerful natural-disaster-creating force known to man:

Gays.

Yes, gays.  According to Colorado pastors Kevin Swanson and Dave Buehner, the recent fires are god's wrath against the people of Colorado for their liberal attitudes toward homosexuality.

In an interview on Generations Radio, the two ministers were clearly in agreement about what was going on here.  Said Buehner, "Why Colorado Springs?  Understand that Colorado itself is a state that is begging for God's judgment.  How did we do that?...  Our legislative session opened up this year and their very first order of business, their most pressing order of business..."  Swanson then interrupted with, "... they could hardly wait, they could hardly wait..."  And Buehner finished, "Like the first day, was to pass a Civil Union Bill, which is an uncivil bill."

And, of course, the whole thing wouldn't be complete without some mention of gay guys kissing, in this case State Senate Majority Leader Mark Ferrendino kissing his partner when they found out that the Civil Union Bill had passed, a photograph of which appeared on the front page of the Denver Post.  Said Swanson:

"When you have a state where the House leadership is performing a homosexual act on the front page of the Denver Post two months ago?  Does God read the Denver Post?  Do you think He picks up a copy of the Denver Post?  He gets it.  God gets the Denver Post."

Delivered right to His Almighty Doorstep, I'm sure.

Then, the question came up as to why, if god was trying to smite Colorado for supporting gays, the fires hit the religious and conservative areas near Colorado Springs, rather than far more liberal bastions of Denver or Boulder.  Buehner said, "Judgment begins in the House of God," as if that made complete sense, and added that the fact that god hadn't yet destroyed the entire state was an "act of grace."
 
What strikes me about all of this is that god, for all of his supposedly omnipotent smiting power, so often chooses to smite parts of the world with disasters that they pretty much already had happening beforehand.  He sends earthquakes to places that are on fault lines and near subduction zones, hurricanes to the Gulf Coast and US Atlantic Seaboard, tornadoes to the American midwest, and catastrophic forest fires to the southwestern United States and the arid parts of southern Europe.  Funny thing, that.  If I didn't know better, I would think that this meant that these events are purely... natural.

The other thing that crosses my mind, here, is that if gays really are behind all of this, maybe they should flex their muscles a little.  Hey, if you have this kind of power, why not enjoy it, especially since god's aim seems to be a bit off?  You guys could be the next generation of Mad Scientists -- but instead of rubbing your hands together and cackling maniacally before firing up your Laser Cannons, all you do is stand around and kiss, and god smites, say, Omaha.

It'd be even better if you could figure out how to target this force a little better.  Wouldn't it be cool if, for example, you could kiss and have god send a tornado to destroy the Westboro Baptist Church?  If I thought that would happen, I would happily kiss a guy, and I'm not even gay.

So anyhow, that's today's news from the Wacko Fringe Religion Department.  As I've pointed out before, however crazy this stuff sounds to nonbelievers -- and even, I hope, to most sensible Christians -- it really is completely consistent with the behavior of god as laid out in the Old Testament.  So these guys, however they seem like they're in dire need of jackets with extra long sleeves, are actually just preaching what the Holy Book says.

I'm not saying it's sensible, mind you.  I still think the folks who believe this stuff are crazy as bedbugs.  All I'm saying is that it's consistent.

Anyhow, I guess I'll wind things up here.  It's time for me to go take a shower and get dressed, which will offer me several more opportunities to break some Old Testament rules.  Maybe if I wear a shirt woven from two different kinds of thread (such an important rule that it was mentioned twice, Leviticus 19:19 and Deuteronomy 22:11) then god will smite Ann Coulter.

Hey, it's worth a try.