On Wednesday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced the 12th consecutive month of record-high global temperatures, marking a yearlong heat spell that my colleagues say is an irrefutable harbinger of the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis.
Using NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies site, from 1900 until today, April’s global temperature increased to 2.6 degrees Fahrenheit (F), or 1.43 degrees Celsius (C).
Last month on Earth Day, 177 countries signed onto the Paris Agreement with an optimistic goal of remaining close to 2.7 degrees F (1.5 degrees C) warming and not exceeding a dangerous 3.6 degrees F (2 degrees C) ceiling.
Based on April’s temperature, Earth is well on its way to the 3.6 degrees F (2 degrees C) boundary. My colleagues are predicting with 99 percent accuracy that 2016 will eclipse 2015 as the hottest year on record.
This much we do know: 15 of the 16 hottest years on record have occurred since 2000.
Let me draw your attention to the far north: Alaska, Greenland, Siberia and Russia. They have warmed between seven and 16 degrees F (4 and 8.9 degrees C) above normal. As a result, methane — which is 100 times stronger at trapping heat than carbon dioxide for the first decade in the atmosphere — is now leaking from once permanently frozen, now thawing, subarctic soils at a phenomenal rate. Methane is currently at its highest level in over 800,000 years, registering 1,880 parts per billion.
Consequently, the world’s April forest fire map is alight with numerous red dots. The raging eastward-moving firestorm that knocked down production by one million barrels a day from the Albertan tar sands is over 1.2 million acres, or three times the size of the area of the City of Los Angeles. On Thursday, it crossed the provincial border into Saskatchewan.
The climate crisis has created the perfect storm for wildfires. Fire seasons are getting longer. Spring this year sprung at least one month earlier than normal in the far north. A warming atmosphere means more lightening, which translates into more ignition sources. A warmer atmosphere also means that the far north forests are drying up, becoming more prone to firestorms. Last year, wildfires charred over 10 million acres across America – it was the costliest fire season on record, at $1.7 billion.
Indigenous bark beetles have already killed over 30 billion mature pines and spruces across western North America. The beetles have entered the far north forests for the first time. Until recently, frigid temperatures precluded the beetles from accessing an unlimited food source of Jack pines spanning the entire northern forests across to Labrador.
In 2012, heat melted 562 billion tons of Greenland’s land ice or the equivalent volume of water to 224,800,000 Olympic swimming pools. This year, Greenland’s spring melt began one month earlier than in 2012. So we can expect at least another quarter-billion Olympic swimming pools of water draining into the Atlantic Ocean. That means six million people in south Florida who live below the sea level will be required to relocate because sea level is unequivocally rising.
We need lawmakers in Washington, DC to understand that what we do to the Arctic by burning heat-trapping fossil fuels, we do to ourselves. It is time now for the federal government to spend money on Main Street by future-proofing all towns and cities across America, preparing citizens for rising sea levels, more firestorms and more wild weather.
Earth Doctor Reese Halter is the author of “The Insatiable Bark Beetle.”
