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The Impossible Heat Wave Era is Upon Us
The Impossible Heat Wave Era is Upon Us
Photo by Mamunur Rashid/NurPhoto/Shutterstock
At the end of March and into the early days of April, the Sahel region of Africa experienced an unprecedented heat wave. Extreme temperatures descended upon Guinea, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Niger, Nigeria, and Chad. One city in Mali recorded a temperature of 48.5 degrees Celsius (over 119 degrees Fahrenheit). The heat wave was impossible.
Or, it would have been impossible without the 1.2 degrees Celsius that humans have already baked into the global climate system. That’s the conclusion from scientists with World Weather Attribution, a group that makes rapid assessments of climate change’s influence on extreme weather events. They use various modeling and observational techniques to establish a “fingerprint” of warming on a given event; in this case, it simply wouldn’t have happened in a normal world.
Death tolls from heat waves often don’t become clear until months later, but there are early indications of its severity. One hospital in Mali’s capital Bamako recorded 102 deaths just between April 1st and April 4th. That same hospital recorded 130 deaths over all of April 2023. Many areas affected by the heat had power cuts at the same time, exacerbating the problem.
The otherwise-impossibility of these events is going to more or less become the norm. Most of World Weather Attribution’s results suggest increased odds, incrementally juiced temperatures, higher likelihood of that much rain, and so on. In virtually every event now (they do occasionally find that climate change had little influence), warming’s effect is clear and dramatic — but there is something viscerally different about events that would not have just been rare but literally could not have happened without the blanket of greenhouse gases humans have tucked around the planet.
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We’re Supposed To Be Done Finding New Oil and Gas. We’re Not.
Oil and gas reserves discovered and approved just since 2021 would add an entire year of China’s emissions to the atmosphere. That’s according to a new analysis from Carbon Brief, using Global Energy Monitor Data, and boy is it grim.
A total of 14 billion tons of carbon dioxide are locked up in the new reserves. About 8 billion of that is in brand new discoveries just in 2022 and 2023, with the other 6 billion from previously known reserves newly approved in the last few years. This fossil fuel bonanza is spread around the world, with some areas with brand new or burgeoning industries like Guyana and Namibia playing a big role.
This is not how it is supposed to go right now. In 2021, researchers published a study in Nature that estimated nearly 60 percent of oil and fossil gas needed to remain tucked away in the ground in order to have a chance at limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the ambitious (and now likely lost) target set forth in the 2015 Paris Agreement. And that was the oil and gas we knew about then.
“Furthermore, we estimate that oil and gas production must decline globally by 3 per cent each year until 2050,” those researchers added. That’s, uh, not what’s happening so far.
Also in 2021, the International Energy Agency released its first “Net Zero by 2050” roadmap, laying out the pathway to actually decarbonize the world’s economy. In it, a familiar refrain: “Beyond projects already committed as of 2021, there are no new oil and gas fields approved for development in our pathway.”
Then, last year, from Oil Change International, an update: …