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What does a spiking sea surface temperature mean for me?

If there was ever a chart that I would expect to cause abject panic in world leadership, it would be this one. This chart should be the front page news of every newspaper right now, but it’s not.

The challenge science communicators have is that many people will look at this chart and say “so what? what does this mean for me?” and that’s a hard question to answer.

Imagine you were in an apartment building, and a wrecking ball outside was winding up to swing at the building you were in. You could see it winding up, but it hadn’t actually swung a damaging blow to you yet. Which specific rooms and walls will be damaged? Hard to say!

I don’t think anyone knows the exact multitude of ways that this wrecking ball will affect everything, but there are some obvious guesses:

• The water is much warmer, so more water will evaporate into the atmosphere. It looks like a major hurricane season is kicking off months early.
• This will surely disrupt the ocean food chain. But how much? Warm water holds less oxygen for fish, and we’ve already seen mass fish die offs this year. Will plankton (that generate our oxygen) survive this abrupt of a change?
• Land surface temperature follows sea surface temperature. Be prepared for more “heat domes” and other brand new meteorological effects! Hopefully the coming heat waves don’t cause crop failures!
• This probably accelerates Greenland’s ice sheet melting even more. Expect more coastal flooding!
• Crap, this is much worse than previous El Nino years (also graphed). Are we hitting tipping points and runaway climate change?

What is even more concerning are the myriad second and third order effects that happen after the obvious first order things. Will this fundamentally change the Atlantic currents that make the climate in Europe what it is? Will the building collapse because the wrecking ball hit a load bearing wall?

What do we do?

I’m not talking about recycling. I think you and I both know that’s not even in the same ballpark of what needs to happen to fix this. Most of the world is still busy thinking about getting to “net zero” emissions, which doesn’t even address the 1.6 trillion tons of existing comitted emissions. Getting to “net zero” is insufficient to avoid the coming calamity. But even if “net zero” was a sufficient goal, we are still doing an astonishingly terrible job of even that! Emissions are still rising!

So, please check out these selected other posts I wrote on things you can do to help:

• Are you yelling until your voice is hoarse?
• Your pie chart looks different than others
• Sell Bitcoin, Save Lives
• Are you spending your attention and money well?

Unfortunately, even though the above things are all necessary, they may not be sufficient. The order of scale we need is to immediately revert to agrarian society, and I certainly can’t snap my fingers and make that happen. So, what can you do if you can’t force everyone else to change?

You should be preparing for a different planet, right now.

• It’s seat belt time

Look, the worst part about focusing on adaptation is that not everyone has the ability, foresight, or means to adapt! Climate change is going to hit some very poor nations first (Pakistan already went under water). This feels extremely inequitable, and the powerful countries that have gotten us into this mess (us) have a moral obligation to do everything to reverse this, keep the planet habitable, and support the most impacted. But I also can’t snap my fingers and make that happen either. So, adaptation.

Luckily, you are one of those people with foresight, right? You can see this happening too? You’ve got a head start! That’s very valuable! Get to work on preparing to be on a different planet!

• Project Lifeboat

A personal update

This is my blog after all. Maybe you care about my life. Here is what we’re doing:

• Last year we moved to northern Michigan for precisely the reasons in this blog post. Northern Michigan is awesome and is also frequently cited as a possible climate change safe haven. We’re surrounded by fresh water, though I have to admit the wild fire smoke has shown up a few years earlier than I was expecting it to.
• For half the price of our townhome in Utah, we are building a solar powered, low carbon Passive House on a few acres near a bike path to a small town and a lake. “Passive” houses are great - they use so little energy you can heat them in the winter with very little solar electricity, and their painstaking control of air ventilation means you get constantly clean air through your HRV/ERV ventilator.
• We’re gardening all sorts of things and are going to get chickens and maybe goats. I don’t know about the goats.
• We’re otherwise attempting to zero our carbon footprint (not just net zero!) and invest in things and people that help achieve this for others.

It’s time we get as many people that will listen as possible ready for this new planet we’re journeying to. We might not outrun the wrecking ball indefinitely, but we’re going to sure as hell try. Join us!