“Water, water, everywhere, And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink.”
(Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner)
Finally, Donald Trump and I agree on something – the US needs to build a wall, and it’s a national emergency. But not his rinky-dinky 2,000-mile wall along the Mexican border for a measly $25bn.
The wall I’m thinking of is 11,000 miles (17.7702km) long and 60ft (18m) high that will cost many hundreds of billions. It might cost a lot more depending on how thick it has to be. I’m not an engineer. This wall will have to keep out the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans plus the Gulf of Mexico … oopsie … Gulf of America.
Global warming and climate change
In June 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen testified before the US Senate: “The Earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements … there is only a one percent chance of an accidental warming of this magnitude … the greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now … in any given month, there is almost as much area that is cooler than normal as there is warmer than normal. A few decades in the future … it is warm almost everywhere.”
‘Global warming’ became the descriptive term for a while.
Hansen’s testimony freaked out Big Oil and the coal industry. They ran the numbers. Hansen was right. The greenhouse effect is caused mainly by carbon emissions, 75% of which come from fossil fuels. One thing they all agreed – they did not want the public getting upset and this hurting their bottom line.
In 2003, Republican spin-doctor Frank Luntz wrote a confidential memo to President George W Bush based on findings from focus groups: “It’s time for us to start talking about ‘climate change’ instead of global warming, and ‘conservation’ instead of preservation. ‘Climate change’ is less frightening than ‘global warming’… While global warming has catastrophic connotations attached to it, climate change suggests a more controllable and less emotional challenge.”
The climate crisis is now
Climate change is a result of global warming, but it’s a less scary idea. Climate change is the four seasons – spring, summer, autumn, winter. Climate change is flying from Agadez Niger on the border of the Sahara to Hammerfest in northern Norway. During a 2017 Arctic chill, President Trump joked in a tweet on 29 December: “Perhaps we could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming.” Ha-ha.
Global warming is not ha-ha, not even as a really dumb joke. Guess what? The “few decades in the future” that James Hansen talked about in 1988 is now.
Between 1900 and 1980, global mean temperature rose 0.2°C. Between 1980 and 2019, it rose by a factor of five to 1.0°C (1.8°F). The last 10 years have been the hottest since record-keeping began, according to data published by US research group Berkeley Earth.
You would think that Hansen’s testimony and all the info since would have acted as a wake-up call. Think again.
Pew Research found that only 37% of Americans consider climate change, a serious problem. If the public doesn’t care, why should the leaders care? George HW Bush had been an oil man. Bill Clinton was triangulating, doing as much as possible to upset as few as possible, including Big Oil and coal. W was his father’s son. Barack Obama’s efforts to combat global warming produced ‘mixed results’.
And now we have Donald J Trump … again.
The climate change denier president needs a new wall
In an interview with the Washington Post, after his own administration published a 1,600-page national climate assessment, which paints a dire picture of the coming effects of global warming, Trump said he didn’t believe it. He’s way too smart to be fooled by a bunch of geoscientists. “One of the problems that a lot of people like myself – we have very high levels of intelligence, but we’re not necessarily such believers. You look at our air and our water, and it’s right now at a record clean… And when you’re talking about an atmosphere, oceans are very small.” Total gibberish but you get the point.
Trump believes global warming is a hoax and regulations to combat it are “anti-growth”. Among other government regulations to combat global warming, he revoked standards for sea level rise. And this is why the US needs to build an 11,000-mile wall.
It will run from Estcourt Station in Maine along the Atlantic coast to the Florida Keys, then swing around the Gulf of America (?) to South Point near Brownsville Texas. When the Mexican coast floods, the population can all move to Mexico City which is 7,200ft (2.2km) above sea level. As they say in Spanish, no problemo.
The western wall will start in San Diego, up the Pacific coast to the tip of Washington. It will jump over Canada – they can build their own damn wall – and continue around Alaska. Not forgetting that offshore territories – Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Northern Marianas, American Samoa, and the US Virgin Islands – will need walls of their own.
Where is all this water coming from?
Well, to start with, glaciers in the northern hemisphere have lost nine trillion tons of ice since 1961. At this rate, there will be no glaciers north of the equator by the end of this century. That’s north of the equator: it gets worse in the south.
Antarctica is losing three Olympic-size swimming pools of water every second, according to France’s National Centre for Scientific Research. That’s 273 billion metric tonnes a year. In the best-case scenario, the UN estimates the seas will rise one foot (30cm) in the 21st century. That’s the ‘best of all possible worlds’ scenario. But we are not living in the best of all possible worlds.
Each year the Earth is getting warmer and warmer. Right now, as I write, there is a crack in the Antarctic ice shelf that holds back the Thwaites Glacier. When, not if, that ice shelf breaks off, it will create an iceberg as big as the state of Rhode Island. But wait, that’s the good news.
The bad news is the Thwaites Glacier will then slide into the ocean. It’s the size of Texas and will create a 5ft (150cm) sea rise. Next comes the Pine Island Glacier which is even bigger than Thwaites. Glub … Glub …
The risks of not limiting warming
The Paris Agreement’s long-term goal is to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C, since this would substantially reduce the risks and effects of global warming. Currently it’s 1.4°C.
According to a University of Washington study, the odds against an increase to 1.5°C are 9:1. There is a 90% likelihood that temperatures will rise between 2°C and 4.9°C by 2100. “Technological advances are expected to cut global carbon intensity by 90% over the course of the century. However, this decline still will not be steep enough to avoid breaching the 2°C limit.”
Princeton professor of geoscience, Michael Oppenheimer, states that when global temperatures increase to 2°C, there will be a 20–30ft rise in overall sea level. Imagine scuba-diving in Greenwich Village (23ft above sea level) or Flipper the friendly dolphin swishing around the huge lobby of the grand Hotel Del Coronado, San Diego (3ft above sea level). There will be no more fishermen on Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco (3ft above sea level).
We will know what it means to miss New Orleans (2ft below sea level already). Forget wild beach parties in Florida during college spring break because there will be no beaches in Florida, at least not where they are now. Imagine palm trees in Alaska, coconuts as the #1 export of Siberia, or polar bears prowling the corridors of the gigantic Minneapolis Mall of America – and they’re really pissed off.
Where will everyone be in 10 years?
Seriously. Environmentalist Bill McKibben says that global warming is not a conflict between environmentalist and industrialist, or liberals and conservatives. This is a conflict between humans and physics – and physics doesn’t compromise.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report gives us 10 years to convert 50% of the world’s energy generation to renewables in order to avoid “catastrophic impacts of global warming”. Want to take bets?
What are the catastrophic impacts of global warming? Take one example. Many millions live along the coast of Bangladesh (pop. 169mn), including Dhaka (9mn) which is 12ft (3.6m) above sea level. Bangladesh has a current population density of 1555/km2, compared to 240/km2 in the US. Where will they go?
The UN predicts there could be 200mn–1bn “climate refugees” between now and the end of the century. The Maldives and other low-lying islands around the world will disappear altogether.
It makes me seasick just to think about it.
