Part Five
FIFTEEN
Widespread public alarm about climate change finally began to appear in the 2010s. Unfortunately, so did some of the negative impacts of climate change that had not been expected until the 2050s. In fact, it was the precocious schedule of climate impacts that finally brought about a public awakening during this time. By mid-decade the reality of climate change could no longer be ignored; it was ruining middle-class lives and costing people a lot of money. That it took more than two and a half decades for Americans to awaken to a hazard that was already happening casts a spotlight on the tragic mismatches of the four clocks. Our inherent blindness to the threat of global warming until it was upon us has fated us to suffer its consequences for decades to come, at best.
Right off the bat, 2010 set a record as the hottest year ever. This might have set some alarms bells ringing, but early in the new decade, much of the coverage of climate change was dominated by news that global warming had “paused,” or was on “hiatus,” and that the earth had not warmed since 1998. As it turned out, this was not the case but rather an illusion created by statistical prestidigitation. Because it came on the heels of another fake scandal, Climategate, because a new IPCC report made a roundabout reference to a slowdown in its fourth assessment, and mostly because the usual squad of deniers and their enablers in politics and the press were there to promote any contrary information on climate change, the alleged pause got enormous attention.
Major outlets such as the CBS Evening News, The Economist, Reuters, and, of course, Fox News bought the denier spin, running stories about how the earth had stopped warming and that scientists didn’t know why. Chris Mooney, in a rundown of the piling on for Grist, cites this insufferably smug bit from a CBS Evening News segment: “At the outset of the segment, CBS’s Mark Phillips intoned: ‘Another inconvenient truth has emerged on the way to the apocalypse. The new United Nations report on climate change is expected to blame man-made greenhouse gases more than ever for global warming. But there’s a problem. The global atmosphere hasn’t been warming lately.’”
Except it had. The illusion of the pause derived from a few factors, principal among which was that 1998 was an extraordinarily warm year because of a historic El Niño. So, if you arbitrarily took your starting point as 1998, the next six years looked cooler because they weren’t as warm as 1998, even though every intervening year was warmer than normal. Another problem was that there were exceptionally few temperature records from the large swath of the globe—the Arctic—that was warming faster than any other region of the planet. Testifying that the earth was heating up steadily during the “pause” was a continued warming of the oceans, which absorbed 90 percent of the excess heat being produced by human greenhouse gas emissions.
For all the talk about the mainstream media being alarmist on global warming, my experience, having watched this story unfold from its outset, is that many of the most respected outlets have been remarkably credulous of claims by deniers, even those claims that fall apart with the slightest scrutiny. Editors, including those without an ideological agenda, love to poke holes in the conventional wisdom, and many don’t have sufficient scientific background to see casuistry when it’s presented as though it’s a serious argument by someone with a PhD. Editors are also competitive, and if the global warming story was collapsing, that would be big news. Consequently, the “pause” had its moment, and for a brief period the message delivered to the public was “Stop worrying about climate change.”
This could have teed up still another lost decade, but this time nature intervened. The “pause” percolated in denier circles for several years before it exploded as a mainstream media story as a result of unartful language in the Summary for Policymakers of the IPCC assessment being prepared in 2013. But then every year starting in 2013 recorded average global temperatures in the top ten for records dating back to the 1880s, with many of the years setting a new record, only to have it be broken the very next year. With each passing record year, it became more difficult to sell the notion of a pause in global warming with a straight face. The 2010s turned out to be the hottest decade ever recorded.
The “pause” soon dropped from the headlines, but the denier community has never been one to put aside a good argument just because it’s proven false. Even in 2020, denier-friendly blogs were dredging up papers that discussed the hiatus and even “a slight cooling” during the 1998–2012 period. Just to be clear, that period had record- or near-record-setting years in 2000, 2005, 2009, and 2010, and every other year was significantly above normal. The only sense in which there was any cooling was that a few very warm years did not set records. In fact, every year during that period would have set a new record for warmth in the 1980s, the decade during which the signal of global warming first began to emerge from the background noise.
The 2010s served up plenty more besides heat. In 2012, Hurricane Sandy hit the Northeast, overwhelming defenses that had withstood storms for more than a hundred years. With Sandy, as with so many other storms, it wasn’t the wind so much as the storm surge that wreaked havoc. The hurricane hit New York with 90-mile-per-hour winds, moderate by hurricane standards, but it was the largest hurricane ever recorded in terms of extent, and with more than 1,000 miles of ocean to work with, its easterlies, north of its center (Sandy made landfall near Atlantic City), could gather immense amounts of water and push that water toward the coast. With exquisite timing, the storm surge on October 29, 2012, hit New York Harbor at high tide during a full moon. Measured at 14 feet, the surge broke the old record for Battery Park by 4 feet.
Even this, however, wouldn’t have overwhelmed New York’s subways but for the added push of climate change. Sea level rise resulting from global warming gave the storm surge the boost it needed to make the floods record-breaking. The components of the surge were a 4-foot 6-inch tide and 9 feet 4 inches of storm surge on top of more than 1 foot of sea level rise in New York Harbor (sea level rise in the harbor exceeded average global sea level rise for reasons that will be discussed in the next chapter) since the subways were built. The combination of storm surge and high tide still would have flooded the subways without the higher sea level, but the raised base of sea level meant that the subways would have flooded even with less than a high tide and full moon.
As it was, the storm flooded nine subway stations and four of fourteen subway tunnels (two of which were managed by PATH rather than the MTA). Sandy inflicted $5 billion in damage on the subways, $19 billion on New York City, and more than $74 billion in total costs. A study published in Nature in 2021 estimated that sea level associated with climate change increased Sandy’s damages by $8 billion. The other ways in which climate change contributed to Sandy’s power are more difficult to tease out, but sea level rise was a factor obvious to anyone who could master addition. The engineers who designed New York City’s defenses in the nineteenth century to withstand 1-in-100- to 1-in-400-year events could not have anticipated that climate change would bring a rise in sea level and more frequent and intense storms. They didn’t know that those events that were vanishingly rare in the nineteenth century might come about every four or five years once global warming began having an impact 125 years later, a nearly hundredfold increase.
I live near the Hudson River at its widest point, about 20 miles north of Manhattan. In the years since the river has been cleaned up (the result of one hundred years of efforts, and one of the great environmental success stories of all time), restaurants and promenades have proliferated along its banks. One of these, Red Hat on the River in Irvington, New York, occupies a former factory building of Lord and Burnham—a company celebrated worldwide for its greenhouses and conservatories—and sits on recovered land a few feet above high-water level (the Hudson is tidal for much of its length). As Sandy’s storm surge boiled up the river, the waters rose over the sea wall and continued rising to a level about 6 feet above the floor of the restaurant (the owners put a mark on a door to show where the floodwaters topped out). Given the width of the river at that point—close to 3 miles—that high-water mark represents an awesome amount of ocean pushed upstream.
Lest anyone miss the lesson of Sandy, nearly three years later, Hurricane Joaquin impacted the South Carolina coast—and just stayed and stayed. In this case, it wasn’t storm surge so much as rainfall, 27 inches over four days, that inundated Charleston and other areas. This too was related to climate change, but in a more attenuated way, and it took some years for climate scientists to understand the geophysics of the connection.
But the data points were piling up. In 2017, Hurricane Harvey hit Houston and then stayed and stayed and stayed. While it was there, it dumped rain continuously, 60 inches of it on some of the surrounding towns. The next year, Hurricane Florence hit the Carolinas with a 10-foot storm surge, and then it just stayed and stayed and stayed. Ultimately, it dumped 3 feet of rain on some districts. At one point, Florence was moving so slowly that the hurricane wouldn’t have kept pace with a pedestrian out for a brisk stroll. Yet another leisurely walker was Hurricane Sally, which hit land near Gulf Shores, Alabama in 2020, ultimately dumping 2.5 feet of rain on the Gulf Coast as it ambled inland at 3 miles an hour. Ida, the first major Atlantic hurricane of 2021, had all the attributes of storms in the climate change era—rapid intensification, very slow movement, major storm surge, and enormous rainfall. After devastating Louisiana, the storm still retained enough punch to paralyze the Northeast, shutting down subways, railways, airports, and highways from Philadelphia to Connecticut.
Forty years ago, these rainfalls would have been dismissed as unimaginable. I remember reading a New Yorker article about an epic rainfall in the South. The storm that prompted the article dropped a foot of rain over the course of a few days. These days a single thunderstorm can dump a foot of water in a matter of hours.
Climate change has contributed to the spate of historic downpours in both direct and indirect ways. Warmer air holds more water, but the new and largely unanticipated factor, the factor that has turned downpours into biblical floods, has been a marked slowdown in storms once they make landfall, which leaves them hovering over areas for days at a time.
The key to the slowdown in these tropical storms may lie far to the north in the Arctic in the perturbations of the jet stream that have resulted from global warming. The warming in the Arctic, accelerated by the reduction in sea ice, has reduced the contrast between Arctic air masses and temperate air to the south. This contrast invigorates the jet stream; the stronger the contrast (or temperature gradient), the faster the jet stream. Jennifer Francis argues that as the temperature gradient decreases, atmospheric waves get larger but also slow down, making weather patterns more persistent. In other cases, the jet stream retreats northward, leaving storms stranded with no upper-level winds to steer them on their way.
The decade’s series of record-setting rainfalls were the result of a cascade of repercussions related to the warming of the globe. Perhaps even more remarkable, this same set of connections between the Arctic and lower latitudes played a major role in another set of climate-related catastrophes during the decade. It turns out that just as the warming of the Artic contributed to massive floods, it also exacerbated the unending succession of wildfires that afflicted the American West during the decade.
There is no more dramatic evidence that climate change is here than the hellish spate of wildfires in recent years. In California, five of the ten largest wildfires in the state’s history occurred in 2020 alone, and all but two have taken place since 2010 (and, as noted, the oughts had their own series of record-setting fires). The largest wildfire in Australian history torched the country in the Australian summer of 2019–2020. Truly massive fires have swept through Siberia and the Russian Far East. By the end of the decade, it seemed that the world was on fire.
Those who would deflect attention from climate change point to increasing numbers of people moving into fire-prone areas (though, of course, this would not apply to the sparsely populated Russian tundra) and to the buildup of dry wood due to misguided fire suppression policies in places like the American West. But these deflections don’t deflect. People have been moving into dry parts of the West for decades, and the fire suppression policies date back a hundred years (and, in fact, for more than two decades foresters have been trying to reduce the buildup through controlled burns). What is different is that temperatures have risen, winds have picked up, and protracted and repeated droughts have become more frequent. The extremely dry Santa Ana and Diablo winds, which can flow down from the Sierras with near hurricane strength, heating and desiccating vegetation along the way, are becoming more prevalent in winter, which prolongs the fire season into the normally wet months (this was evident during the massive Thomas Fire in California’s Ventura County, which started on December 4, 2017, and burned well into January).
Teasing out the role of climate change in these fires involves rapidly evolving science in real time. Describing what happened requires setting the context of what might be described as the “standard” weather pattern for the United States in winter.
With the vast Pacific Ocean to the west, the normal weather pattern for the West Coast is for the jet stream to veer northward as it nears North America. That brings warmer air south of the jet stream to California, Oregon, and Washington. Typically, the upper-atmosphere winds then travel over Northern Canada, steered into the continent near southern Alaska by the counterclockwise flow of the Aleutian Low, which strengthens over winter. Once over north-central Canada, the normal-year jet stream then starts south, bringing cooler air to the central and eastern states of the United States. This is why East Coast cities tend to have colder, snowier winters than West Coast cities at the same latitude. This flow gets interrupted by Pacific storms and other factors, but then reestablishes itself.
Things began changing after 1980. The Aleutian Low started to become more erratic in terms of when and even whether it would appear, while the more southerly high-pressure ridge, which usually lasts a matter of days before being disrupted, has been extending northward and becoming so pronounced that it actually blocks Pacific storms from hitting the West Coast by diverting the jet stream storm track much farther north than usual. This causes the jet stream to pick up much colder air in its transit through the Arctic and deliver it to the midcontinent and East, leading to the series of protracted cold spells and “snowmageddons” we’ve experienced in recent years.
Moreover, the ridge started to persist long beyond the usual life span of such systems. Typically, a high-pressure ridge might last for a matter of days before being disrupted by storms or other events. Beginning in the 2010s, these ridges would form and persist for weeks, even months. Indeed, in 2013, a ridge formed and lasted the entire winter. This was repeated in the following winter, and the winter after that. The phenomenon was so extreme that in December 2013, Daniel Swain, then a graduate student at Stanford, dubbed it “the Ridiculously Resilient Ridge.” The name stuck—often shortened to the RRR—and even made it into the scientific literature.
By diverting storms away from the coast, the ridge had other impacts. Protected by the calm air under the high-pressure dome, a blob of warm water surfaced and also persisted. Over seven hundred days it grew to gigantic proportions, ranging between 600,000 and 1 million square miles of ocean (nearly four times the size of Texas) and extending down to 400 feet. Dubbed “the Blob” by research meteorologist Nicholas Bond, this enormous mass of warm water had its own impacts. Apart from enhancing West Coast droughts, the Blob proved to be a mass murderer of marine life up and down the West Coast from California to Alaska. (In the southern hemisphere, an Australia-sized blob has been a persistent presence in the Pacific east of New Zealand, and its attendant high-pressure ridge has been a factor in the decades-long drought afflicting parts of Chile and Argentina.)
During increasingly rare “normal” years, the jet stream will steer Pacific storms into the Gulf of Alaska and environs, stirring up the ocean waters. In turn, the mixing brings nutrient-rich colder waters to the surface to the delight of tiny organisms called krill, which feast on the phytoplankton. When a blob forms, no such stirring takes place, and the entire oceanic food chain suffers. Baleen whales can’t find krill; petrels starve; salmon, which eat krill and the fish that eat krill, starve; orcas that depend on salmon as a staple of their diet suffer, as do sea lions and countless other creatures. Not surprisingly, there’s been an increase in mass die-offs of gray whales, seals, and various types of birds coincident with the Blob.
One vivid example of this disrupted food chain was recounted to Audubon magazine by Kathy Kuletz, a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Short-tailed shearwaters, Pacific Ocean seabirds, typically migrate in April, from their breeding grounds on islands off Australia northward to the Bering Sea, to feast on the explosion of small sea life following the winter mixing of the northern waters. It’s a trip of more than 11,000 miles, and the species takes the risk of the journey because their ancestors had prospered from the bounty that awaited them. Because there are only thin pickings over much of their journey (shearwaters will dive more than 200 feet down to find a meal), the birds don’t have much in the way of reserves when they arrive up north. When the Blob shuts down mixing, the shearwaters find no food at the end of their epic journey, and they starve by the hundreds of thousands.
Then there are the second-order impacts. The warm Blob waters fostered a huge algal bloom in 2015. The bloom included an alga that contained the neurotoxin domoic acid. The vast bloom shut down crabbing, clamming, and fishing operations from Alaska to Southern California. Another second-order impact involved increased crab-line entanglements and ship collisions as humpback whales moved closer to shore to eat anchovies as krill declined in the open water.
Three years after the first blob broke up, a new blob formed in 2016. Then in 2020 Blob 2.0 (as it was called) arrived and grew to be as big as the first one. Its impact came even as the lingering impacts of the first marine heat wave (a more formal name for blobs) hit ecosystems and fisheries. For instance, Chinook salmon born during the first blob found nothing to eat once hatched. In 2019, three years after hatching, the Chinooks should have begun returning to their birth rivers to spawn. Few did; 2019 saw the lowest Chinook salmon run ever recorded.
The marine heat waves and die-offs are a worldwide phenomenon, a stark reminder that creatures adapted to a particular climate cannot simply move or change their ways when circumstances change (marine heat waves are also responsible for the increasing number of coral die-offs, including the massive one imperiling the Great Barrier Reef). Halfway around the world from the Northeast Pacific, in 2015, twenty thousand endangered saiga antelope died in a matter of days on the Kazakh steppe when temperatures soared to more than 100 degrees Fahrenheit. The cause of death was blood poisoning as the heat and 80 percent humidity caused ordinarily harmless bacteria to migrate from the animals’ tonsils to the bloodstream. In Australia in 2014, extreme heat killed forty-five thousand flying foxes (fruit-eating bats) in one day. Not all mass die-offs are caused by climate change, of course; many can be traced to other human impacts such as toxic pollution. The accelerating number of die-offs, documented by a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2015, underscores the fact that the fragile balancing acts that sustain most of the world’s ecosystems are teetering badly, with climate change increasingly causing the wobbles. These mass mortality events show us that creatures that have adapted over thousands if not tens of thousands of years to particular climatic and oceanic conditions cannot simply adjust when those conditions change abruptly.
Humans are supremely adaptable, but, given our numbers, not all of us can adapt either. Joseph Stalin is reported to have remarked, “If only one man dies of hunger, that is a tragedy. If millions die, that’s only statistics.” A corollary of that remark for the news business is that if a neighbor dies of hunger, that merits the front page, but if hundreds of thousands die on the other side of the globe, that’s a paragraph on page 24. Unfortunately, that cynical rule of thumb applies very well to perceptions of climate change. While climate-related news in the United States has focused on people uprooted by wildfires or flooding, in faraway places such as Iran, large tracts of land have been rendered uninhabitable by extreme heat, forcing farmers to migrate to other parts of their country. Often the migrants end up moving to areas that are also suffering the impacts of climate change. In Pakistan, if it’s not the heat, it’s the recurrent floods forcing migration, floods caused by an extreme monsoon in 2010, or outburst flooding from mountain lakes pushed beyond their capacity by melting glaciers. In the Pacific, entire island nations, such as Kiribati, are slowly submerging as seas rise.
Migration was much in the news during the 2010s. Europe experienced waves of migrants, many of whom came by boat. They were fleeing war, civil unrest, and persecution in homelands including Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Eretria, and other unstable areas. At times, the flood of people overwhelmed Europe’s ability to absorb them—in 2015 Greece alone received more than eight hundred thousand migrants and refugees—and the human tide precipitated a rise of anti-immigrant, populist politicians who became destabilizing forces in their own right.
Obscured by the headlines of migrants drowning or being cast adrift by human traffickers was a marked increase in internal migration caused by weather. In 2017, 68.5 million people were forcibly displaced according to the World Bank, and an estimated one-third of these displacements were caused by “sudden onset” weather-related events. More pernicious and even less noticed were migrations caused by weather that was not “sudden onset” but rather an inexorable rise in temperatures and/or drop in precipitation.
In Iran there are different types of heat. In the desert, temperatures soar, but the humidity is quite low, which makes it possible to work at relatively high temperatures. But then there was that day in 2017 when the temperature in Ahvaz in Khuzestan Province, Iran, reached 129 degrees Fahrenheit, the highest temperature ever recorded in the country. With temperatures that high or close to it, a situation that characterized a good deal of Iran, outdoor work is impossible, and crops wither. If the rising temperatures are accompanied by a drop in rainfall (also the situation in much of Iran), making a living as a farmer becomes untenable as well.
The situation closer to the coast of the Persian Gulf is even worse. On July 31, 2015, in the coastal city of Bandar-e Mahshahr, the temperature soared to 115 degrees Fahrenheit, which doesn’t sound so bad—until one considers the humidity. On that day, the dewpoint—the temperature at which water vapor condenses—was 90 degrees Fahrenheit. This yields a heat index of 165 degrees. To put this in perspective, the U.S. National Weather Service warns that sunstroke and heat exhaustion become likely with a heat index of 105 degrees Fahrenheit.
Life-threatening temperatures are occurring in unexpected places, including the Far North. In the town of Lytton, northeast of Vancouver in British Columbia, the temperature reached 121.3 degrees Fahrenheit on June 29, 2021, marking the third consecutive day temperatures set an all-time record high for all of Canada. The record was an astonishing 8 degrees Fahrenheit higher than the previous record (most all-time records are broken by mere fractions of a degree), and the blast heat torched areas in Canada and the U.S. Pacific Northwest where fewer people have air-conditioning. This led to a surge of unexpected deaths in metro areas such as Seattle and Vancouver.
Recent studies have suggested that humans cannot survive when a “wet bulb” temperature exceeds a certain limit. These temperatures are calculated by draping a wetted wick over the bulb of a thermometer and measuring the temperature after the water cools the thermometer. The resulting temperature is the lowest that can be achieved by the evaporation of water. This technique is used to calculate humidity, but it’s also used to calculate the limits of human heat tolerance. A study led by Colin Raymond and published in Science Advances in 2020 held that once wet bulb temperatures reach 95 degrees Fahrenheit, the human body cannot shed heat fast enough through sweating to maintain body temperature, leading to fatal hyperthermia and heatstroke.
The study notes that the deadly European heat wave of 2003, which ultimately killed an estimated seventy thousand people, had wet bulb readings that never exceeded 82.4 degrees Fahrenheit. It also notes that there were no records of wet bulb readings above 91.4 degrees and only a few calculated near that level. The wet bulb temperature for Bandar-e Mahshahr in Iran on that July day in 2015 was 94.3 degrees Fahrenheit, breaking the previous record by 3 degrees Fahrenheit. It was just slightly below the level that would have produced mass fatalities.
In the European heat wave, as well as in many other events, it was the high nighttime temperatures that caused many of the deaths, particularly among the elderly. These temperatures too are rising to unimaginable levels in many parts of the world. In Quriyat, Oman, situated on the Gulf of Oman, there was a period of fifty-one hours in 2018 when the temperature never dropped below 107 degrees Fahrenheit.
The increase in reports of such temperatures suggests that even now, some parts of the planet, including areas that have been inhabited since the dawn of civilization, are now becoming uninhabitable. This was long expected; indeed, the Raymond study predicted that temperatures beyond the threshold of human viability would become frequent events later in this century.
Even now, entire continents are experiencing unprecedented heat. A State of the Climate Report from Australia in 2020 noted that during a fifty-eight-year span there were a total of twenty-four days when the average high temperature for the entire continent was above 39 degrees Celsius (102.2 degrees Fahrenheit), less than one day every two years. In 2019 there were thirty-three such days.
We expect the Middle East and Australia to be hot; we don’t expect that the Arctic will be hot. Expectations notwithstanding, in recent years the Far North has experienced increasing numbers of heat waves. In the summer of 2019, an extraordinary heat wave affected much of Europe in July and August. Paris temperatures reached 108 degrees Fahrenheit, and many other cities baked in Saharan temperatures. Helsinki, Finland, hit 92 degrees Fahrenheit, the highest temperature recorded in the city since 1844. Then the hot dome moved even farther north, ultimately covering much of Greenland and bathing the ice sheet in temperatures that reached the upper eighties. The ice responded by melting, some 40 billion tons of it in this one event, an amount that measurably raised sea levels around the world. The stunning summer event was just the latest of a series of heat waves hitting all areas of the Far North. In the summer of 2020, the temperature reached 100.4 degrees in the town of Verkhoyansk in the Russian Far East, marking the first time in recorded history anywhere in the world that the temperature had exceeded 100 degrees Fahrenheit above the Arctic Circle. Then, in the summer of 2021, the Greenland Ice Sheet was hit with another extraordinary heat wave, marked by record-setting temperatures and massive runoff. Polar Portal, a Danish monitoring group, estimates that the rate of mass loss of the ice sheet in recent years has been four times the rate in the years preceding 2000.
With more heat has come some truly strange side effects. In the Russian Far North, accelerated melting of the permafrost has caused methane buildups under the land surface, leaving the tundra littered with mysterious domes. One survey in 2017 counted seven thousand such mounds. Many of these are former pingos—massive blocks of ice frozen under the permafrost. As the ice melts, methane is released, replacing ice in the underground cavity. Out of sight of humans, many of these mounds either explode or collapse, creating vast craters on what was once a uniform landscape. Nothing short of a nuclear bomb could create craters as large as some of these explosions/collapses, which put holes in the permafrost as deep as a sixteen-story building. The explosive collapse of one mound in 2013 could be heard 62 miles away. The surreal image of an empty landscape being bombed from below offers a foretaste of the disquieting surprises climate change will bring.
Right now, extreme heat events are taking place in regions that already suffer extreme water and heat stress. Iran gets one-fifth the rainfall of the average nation, and Pakistan ranks fifth on the Global Climate Risk Index for nations vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. The wildfires, droughts, floods, storms, and storm surges of the 2010s offered a proleptic view of the future we face. Given the inertia of the climate system, the longevity of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and humanity’s unwillingness to accept the threat, much less confront it, it is guaranteed that all these events, whether they be sudden or incremental, will become more and more frequent and intense.
The 2010s were a decade during which the evidence that climate was changing became impossible to ignore. It became clear that these changes were portents of mass die-offs in the animal kingdom; forced migrations for millions of peoples whose homelands were rendered uninhabitable by heat, drought, sea level rise, or other derivatives of global warming; and unanticipated expenses in the richer countries as citizens suffered from recurrent floods, windstorms, and wildfires. Reality, the clock that matters most, was telling the world that climate change is here.