USA sets 6,800 high temperature records in March, 2012 as we consider the future when we have money — and nothing else.

by  Dr. Jeffrey Lant
Author’s program note. Future historians, if any of Clio’s ranks remain, will scrutinize this period of our planet as the days when Earth reached its tipping point and began its descent to the unimaginable horrors of the Apocalypse. At least this is the sobering prediction of the International Panel on Climate Change, founded in 1988 by the United Nations. This article highlights this panel, its work, its dire predictions… and asks you not only to contemplate what is happening to us all… but what you can do to save yourself, your family and the pied a terre in the Cosmos for our vulnerable species.
But first, go to any search engine and smile. For not all weather predictions are cataclysmic. Take the one made in 1982 by The Weather Girls, also known as Two Tons o’ Fun. Their hit — their one and only hit — was called “It’s Raining  Men” and featured two plus-size African-American women cavorting with scantily clad boy toys falling from a beneficent heaven. It was cheeky, irreverent… and a superbly good dance song. When this ancient body was much younger and more limber, I cut the rug with it myself. Listen to it now…. because it’s the last thing in this article that gives you absolutely nothing to worry about.
About the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
March 28, 2012 this Nobel Prize-winning panel of climate scientists released its latest bomb shell, in the form of a 594-page report. This report represents an important development in its work. Up until now, the panel has focused on the slow, inexorable rise of temperatures and oceans as part of global warning. Their work, while important and telling to anyone who could read between the lines, didn’t attract much notice. Indeed, since it was the work of scientists and climate wonks who never met a somnifacient phrase they didn’t like, their important work went largely unread.
But this year and this report are very different.
This report is the first to examine the less common but far more noticeable extreme weather changes, which in recent years have been causing $80 billion annually in damage. As Stanford University climate scientist Chris Field, one of the report’s top editors, says, “We mostly experience weather and climate change through the extreme. That’s where we have the losses. That’s where we have the insurance payments. That’s where things have the potential to fall apart.”
“There is disaster risk almost everywhere.”
The conclusion of Field and fellow panelists is stark and cannot be misunderstood. Thus, you can almost hear the instructions given to participants at the start of their important work…
“Friends and colleagues. Our many previous endeavors reported facts in a calm, deliberative fashion. We knew what the findings meant… but because we were not explicit in our conclusions almost no one else did. Thus we assuaged our consciences by reassuring ourselves that we had done our work… and it was for others to draw the implications and do the necessary follow-up work to make sure that the science we knew became the basis for necessary policy changes. But this is no longer enough. We must not only be accurate fact finders, but absolutely clear on what this means and what must be done. In other words, we must go beyond the usual role of scientist and behave as a citizen of the world committed to saving our planet by doing what is necessary before it is too late.”
On this basis, the panel has produced what is to date their most important and influential work.
Item: Some places, particularly parts of Mumbai in India could become uninhabitable from floods, storms, and rising seas. In 2005, over 24 hours nearly 3 feet of rain fell on the city, killing more than 1000 people at once and causing massive damage. Roughly 2.7 million people live in areas at risk of flooding.
Item: Many other cities are also at high risk including Miami, Shanghai, Bangkok, Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City, Myanmar’s Yangon (formerly Rangoon), and India’s Kolkata (formerly Calcutta).
Item: Entire countries like the Maldives are at risk, facing submersion because of rising seas and fierce storms.
Said Field, “The decision about whether or not to move is achingly difficult, and I think it’s one that the world community will have to face with increasing frequency in the future.”
At risk.
This report is unique because it emphasizes managing risks and how taking precautions can work. In other words, it not only highlights risks but is explicit in its recommendations about how to handle them. In fact, the panel report uses the word “risk” 4,387 times… and gives examples of how various cities and countries have learned from them, thereby providing solutions and models for other challenged entities.
Item: Field pointed to storm-and-flood-prone Bangladesh, an impoverished nation that has learned from past disasters. In 1970, a Category 3 tropical cyclone named Bhola killed more than 300,000 people. In 2007, a stronger cyclone killed just 4,200 people. Despite the loss of life, the country is reckoned a success story because it was better prepared and invested in warning and disaster prevention.
By comparison, a country that was not so prepared, Myanmar, was hit with a similar-size storm in 2008, which killed over 138,000 people. This avoidable disaster makes it clear why the work of this panel is so important. Over 138,000 people might well be alive if the repressive government of Myanmar focused less time and money crushing its people and more on the early warning and other tools needed to diminish the horrific weather effects that batter them so often and which this report makes clear will worsen in the years ahead.
The worst is yet to come… unless…
The study — all 594 pages of it — is a Pandora’s box of looming catastrophes. Tropical cyclones — including hurricanes in the United States — will get stronger because of present-day and worse-to-come climate changes. Heat waves and record hot temperatures worldwide will increase with increased downpours in Alaska, Canada, northern and central Europe, East Africa, and north Asia.
Action now… or worldwide grief later.
In the face of so much alarming news, all supported by exact science, it is easy to opt out, confident there is nothing the average person can do but wait and hope. Such a conclusion is not only wrong but calamitous. Here’s what you can do:
1) Urge school officials to disseminate these findings so that young people, who have so much to lose, can be informed.
2) Ask your elected representatives what they are doing to stem the tide and give us meaningful measures, not just partisan rhetoric that is so out-of-place in solving this problem.
3) Make every day “Earth Day”, a top priority. For there can be no progressive change of any kind if the very Earth is threatened, at risk, and increasingly vulnerable.
And I tell you this: when all the water is polluted, when all the air is toxic, when every once fertile acre is arid, we shall still have money. For unlike all the other elements, God-made, money is man made; so let’s spend what is necessary to ensure that our one and only home — Earth — remains as secure as possible, as verdant and productive… a place not of lamentation and anxieties but where all the crucial weather information can be sung by Weather Girls who tell you, “According to our sources, the street’s the place to go/ Cause tonight for the first time/ Just about half past ten/ For the first time in history/ It’s gonna start raining men!” And that’s a fact.