By Vladislav Strekopytov, A Socialist In Canada, May 25, 2023
(This report first appeared in RIA Novosti on May 25, 2023. RIA Novosti is the principal, state-financed media outlet in Russia. The translation to English here below is by A Socialist In Canada. Further below are two related items: An essay from 2015 on the achievements of environmental science during the years of the Soviet Union; and an editorial comment by A Socialist In Canada on the need for environmentalists and the working class movemens around the world to oppose the deadly rise of militarism and war by the wealthy, imperialist countries of the West.)
MOSCOW–The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has said that a relatively cool climate phase for the Earth is over. A hot El Niño period is on the way, causing some areas of the world to experience severe drought and others to experience extreme rainfall and flooding. Not good in the long run is the fact that the temperature of the Earth’s surface will rise by 2.7 degrees and 22 percent of the population will need to change their place of residence due to unbearable heat.
Insidious El Niño
Every year in May, WMO releases the GADCU (Global Annual to Decadal Climate Update) report. [Report for May 2023 here.] It provides the main climatic parameters: the average temperature for the year, pressure, precipitation, as well as the phase states of the main ocean processes that affect the planet’s climate – the North Atlantic Oscillation (AMO) and El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO). A separate section of the document is devoted to the forecast for the next year and for five years.
The new report says that the cold La Niña phase associated with the Southern Oscillation phenomenon in the equatorial Pacific will end in the middle of 2023. This time it was abnormally long – three and a half years instead of the usual one or two. Experts fear that the energy accumulated in the global climate system, held back by La Niña mechanisms, could spill out onto the planet with unpredictable force.
The El Niño phenomenon is associated with an anomalous heating of water that occurs every few years in the central and eastern parts of the Pacific Ocean. The heat from the ocean is transferred to the atmosphere and leads to an increase in temperature around the globe by about 0.1 degrees. As part of natural fluctuations, this growth is compensated during the La Niña period. But in the last hundred years, the atmosphere during the cool phase does not cool down, but continues to heat up, but more slowly.
Thus, the average global temperature in 2022, despite the cooling effect of La Niña, was about 1.15 degrees above the average for the pre-industrial period (1850-1900), and its growth over the past decade was 0.2 degrees.
The previous temperature record was observed in 2016, also during the El Niño phase. There is every chance that he will be beaten in 2024. WMO climatologists suggest that the next five years with a 66 percent probability will become the hottest in the history of meteorological observations, and the average annual temperature will exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius before 2027, the value indicated in the Paris Agreement as a target until 2100.
Scientists predict a record heat wave around the globe, but above all – in the tropical zone between 30 parallels of northern and southern latitudes, where more than a third of the world’s population lives.
The human measurement of heat
According to an international team of climate scientists, who published an article in the journal Nature Sustainability, such a powerful increase in temperature will lead to “existential risk” for millions of people. The results of modeling performed by the authors show that by the end of the 21st century, the temperature of the Earth’s surface will rise by 2.7 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels.
Because of this, 22 percent of the predicted population of the planet – more than two billion people – will be outside the climate comfort zone, which is limited by the isotherm of the average annual temperature of 29 degrees. Studies have shown that sustained temperatures above this threshold are associated with higher mortality, lower productivity and yields, and more conflict and infectious disease.
Even 40 years ago, no more than 12 million people lived in an extremely hot climate. Today, their number has increased fivefold, and will grow even faster in the coming decades. According to climatologists, by 2100, most of the inhabitants of India (600 million), Nigeria (300 million), Indonesia (100 million), as well as the Philippines and Pakistan (80 million each) will be outside the favorable zone.
“Every 0.1 degree of warming exposes an additional 140 million people to dangerous heat,” lead author Timothy Lenton, director of the Global Systems Institute, is quoted in a press release from the University of Exeter. “The costs of global warming are often estimated in financial terms. Our study is the first highlights the human cost of failing to cope with a climate emergency.”
Climate migrants
The researchers note that an increase in average temperatures of 2.7 degrees by the end of the century is a very realistic scenario. But the worst scenarios cannot be ruled out, in which temperatures will rise by 3.6-4.4 degrees. In this case, up to 50 percent of the world’s population will be outside the favorable climatic niche. “This could lead to a large-scale transformation of the Earth’s surface and fundamentally change the habitability of our planet,” says Lenton.
Related news: How a temperature rise of two degrees Celsius threatens billions of people on the planet, by Alistair Walsh, News Clik (India), 23 May 2023
Historically, humanity has been concentrated in two climatic zones: in temperate latitudes with an average annual temperature of about 13 degrees and in tropical monsoon climate zones, where this value is on average at 27 degrees. The first accounts for the maximum of world GDP as an indicator of the well-being of the population, the second – the main volume of production of crops and livestock.
In recent years, the second peak in the human distribution diagram has been gradually shifting towards a colder climate. This suggests that more and more people are moving from warm, traditionally agricultural regions to mid-latitudes. The authors warn that climate migration will only pick up pace, reaching billions of people in the worst-case scenario.
Background:
Late Soviet ecology and the planetary crisis, essay by John Bellamy Foster, published in Monthly Review, issue of June 2015 (cover story) Soviet ecology presents us with an extraordinary set of historical ironies. On the one hand, the USSR in the 1930s and ’40s violently purged many of its leading ecological thinkers and seriously degraded its environment in the quest for rapid industrial expansion. The end result has often been described as a kind of ‘ecocide’… But the Soviet Union developed some of the world’s most dialectical contributions to ecology, revolutionizing science in fields such as climatology, while also introducing pioneering forms of conservation. Aside from its famous zapovedniki (nature reserves for scientific research), it sought to preserve and even to expand its forests. As environmental historian Stephen Brain observes, it established “levels of [forest] protection unparalleled anywhere in the world.” Beginning in the 1960s, the Soviet Union increasingly instituted environmental reforms. In the 1980s, it was the site of what has been called an “ecological revolution”. A growing recognition of this more complex reality has led scholars in recent years to criticize the “ecocide” description of Soviet environmental history as too simplistic…
Comment by editor of A Socialist In Canada:
The NATO provocations against Russia over Ukraine and against China over Taiwan are occuring precisely as modern science is warning in ever-stronger terms of the need for emergency measures to counter the global warming emergency and begin to slow and eventually reverse the steep rise in greenhouse gas emissions. But the leading capitalist and imperialist countries of the world have chosen precisely this time to escalate their militarism and drive to war. This is no accident. It is part of decades-long policies to ‘delay and deflect’ action to counter global warming.
The leading sections of the international working class, including the ecological and environmental movements around the world, should be campaigning for an immediate end to the threats against Russia and China by the NATO countries. They should be fighting for a sharp turn to government policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and reduce all the other despoliation of the planet by expansionist capitalism. The working classes should be aiming to win political power in order to carry the needed transition in human civilization in which social justice and ecological protection and enhancement are to pof agenda. But they and their leaders in the Westrn countries have largely bowed to the anti-Russia and anti-China propaganda of the Western governments. This, in turn, is caused by being ideologically enmeshed in the illusory, privileged lifestyles which are available to so many residents of the wealthy countries. ‘Change my illusory, privileged lifestyle for the sake of saving the planet? On, the horror!’
