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The World Is Not Prepared For Global Warming

This article is more than 5 years old.

USFS

As the world burns this summer, some of the side-effects of long-term global warming are beginning to show themselves, especially in death.

As Somini Sengupta warns in the New York Times, and is echoed by the World Bank, almost a billion people are already at serious risk because of global warming, mostly in southern Asia, a region already having the most hungry and poor people in the world.

Heat waves are setting all-time temperature records across the globe, as they now appear to be doing every year. Europe suffered its deadliest fire in more than a century and the western United States is awash in fires - again.

As I write this, I am hiding inside my home looking across the smoke-obscured basin outside my window as temperatures soar above 100°F and fires burn around us, 600 active fires in British Columbia alone. Judith and I are now resigned to this occurring here every year from now on.

recent Australian study projected a five-fold increase in mortality from extreme heat for the United States by 2080. For less wealthy countries the situation will be much worse – the researchers projected 12 times more deaths in the Philippines over the same time period.

The last four years were the hottest years on record, and El Nino can’t be blamed. Since modern record-keeping began in 1880, seventeen of the eighteen warmest years have occurred since 2001 (see figure). Whether you believe in global warming or not, more people are going to die from heat. In Japan, dozens of heat-related deaths this summer marked an all-time high.

NYT from NASA

Harvests of staple crops like wheat and corn will drop again this year, across Europe, Latin America and the Middle East. Even Sweden has been affected. Corn yields drop over 7% for every degree (C°) that the world warms. Wheat yields drop about 6%, rice and soybeans about 3% for every degree of warming. GMOs that can resist drought and heat are one answer, but that can only go so far.

Drought and crop failures will continue to cause conflicts around the world.

Carbon levels in the atmosphere now exceed any levels over the last 800,000 years. The atmospheric half-life of CO2 is between 30 and 300 years, depending on the degradation pathway so these effects will not be going away anytime soon, especially since we keep putting more into the air.

So what can we do?

First, increase FEMA funding and increase funding for firefighters, especially hotshot firefighters and emergency operations. Those fire-fighting airplanes are not cheap. And $20/hour is not enough for the dangerous job they do, or for the dedication they give to their job. Unfortunately, the government keeps cutting assistance to firefighters and other related FEMA funds, as it has since 2009. For the first time in its 110-year history, the Forest Service is spending more than 50% of its budget fighting wildfires.

Second, stop referring to wildfires as not being natural disasters like floods. Fortunately, a bill to address this, having 124 bipartisan cosponsors, is moving through both chambers of Congress.

Third, weather-harden our infrastructure, choose and site crops carefully, identify areas that will soon flood with sea level rise and don’t build there anymore, and just get ready at all levels for a warming planet.

Fourth, plan for diversity in how we produce power, food and water.

Taking energy as an example, power generation is affected by weather and climate. Heat waves on four continents have crashed power grids this year, so we are not doing a good job of addressing this issue.

We have too many conflicting needs for energy. We want to eradicate global poverty, we want to slow global warming, and we want to adapt to extreme weather events. That’s a heavy lift. Fortunately, it can be done.

Eradicating global poverty will take about 35 million kWhs/year, but it doesn’t really matter what mix of energy sources you use. Reducing emissions means reducing fossil fuels. Finding a mix that can adapt to extreme weather just puts an additional requirement on the non-fossil mix to replace the fossil fuels.

Extremes of hot and cold, or droughts and floods, affect renewables the most. Cold affects natural gas supplies and delivery, and extreme cold affects coal. Nuclear power is the most climate-resistant energy source.

So the only mixes that address all three needs are some combination of nuclear, hydro and renewables with a little natural gas.

Unfortunately, we seem to be shutting down many of our existing nuclear plants for foolish reasons. Fortunately, the warming weather has caused many stalwart anti-nuke governments to question whether they should be cutting back nuclear power in a warming world, as Michael Shellenberger discusses.

South Korea decided last week it needed to switch five additional nuclear plants back on to cope with the additional demand created by high temperatures. The Moon Jae-in Administration's plan to phase out nuclear power has come under question as electricity demand soars amid a scorching heat wave, reported the Korea Times.

In Japan, utilities have been forced to turn on old fossil fuel-fired plants to meet the rising demand, since most of its nuclear plants remain closed.

In June, Taiwan’s anti-nuclear government was forced to restart a closed nuclear reactor in order to meet demand. Last year, the island nation suffered its worst power outage ever when seven million homes were left without electricity.

As the UK endures record high temperatures, it’s also having a wind drought. UK wind power output is down 40% compared to the same period last year. This wind drought is also affecting other European countries, including Germany which has also decided to phase out nuclear but has had to rely on more coal to back up their increasing wind and solar development.

Struggling to keep up with the heat, California’s grid operator warned residents to conserve power and recommended operating appliances at night. California has invested heavily in solar and wind, while it plans to close its only nuclear plant in the 2020s for purely political reasons. ‘If more heat waves are coming, renewable energy alone won’t keep Californians cool,’ wrote Robert Bryce in the Orange County Register.

Meanwhile, U.S. nuclear plants are going strong, operating on average at 99% of capacity as of August 2018, triple that of renewables. Although the installed capacity for non-hydro renewables (139 GW – 13% of U.S. total including wind, solar, geothermal and biomass) is over 40% more than nuclear (98 GW – 9.1% of U.S. total), their production is so intermittent that they produce less than half of what nuclear does - 341 TWhs/year (8.4% of U.S. total) compared to nuclear’s 805 TWhs (19.7% of U.S. total).

While everyone acknowledges the problem of intermittency, their effects will become more dire as the world warms. Storage will help a lot to the extent that it's physically possible, but with technologies foreseeable in the next 50 years, the costs will be in the multiple trillions.

We need a strong combination of nuclear and hydro to buffer the large amount of renewables that, together, are needed to replace a significant amount of fossil fuel. Since we will need even more energy to address a changing climate, and to eradicate global poverty, we need to get this right.

A lot of lives will depend on it.

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