Harsh News from the Weatherman—Nick Humphrey climate change interview—Radio Ecoshock 2019-05-08

Are you tired of nightly news reporting horrible weather disasters and never mentioning climate? You need a real meteorologist like Nick Humphrey. Nick lives in the American heartland, Nebraska, just wrecked by floods. We go from harsh new weather around the world to climate change and back.

Climate change hardly ever comes up in the news. All the advertising selling pickup trucks and SUVs tells us why. But this Spring it seems every newscast is about massive storms, from Texas through Nashville and right up to New York City and Boston. In this interview we get the weather expert view on that persistent storm track this past winter and spring in America.

Show by Radio Ecoshock, reposted under CC License. Episode details at https://www.ecoshock.org/2019/05/harsh-news-from-the-weatherman.html

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SHOW DETAILS
Nick gives us the real news about what happened to the Nebraska farm community this spring. It’s just devastating. Some farms are now useless, after the river floods loaded the fields up with several feet of sand! Others lost all their seed reserves. The financial hardships are extreme.

Nick calculated humans are burning “5,576 years worth of plant growth per day”. That’s all the solar energy stored up in fossil form we burn. “All the carbon released by humanity in the past 25 years is equivalent to over 50 million years of plant growth which was needed to sequester it. This comes to around 250,000 yrs worth of plant growth in 45 days and 5,576 yrs worth of plant growth per day! Humanity has burned nearly 200 million years worth of plant growth in just 160 yrs.”

A collection of climate models from big names like NOAA and the National Science Foundation project much faster climate heating that older models. Instead of 2.5C of warming, our current path takes us to 5C warming and beyond. If confirmed, this is another game-changer. The public has no idea this is happening.

If a record doesn’t fall, we tend to think, “that isn’t so bad, we’ve seen worse than this”. But Nick Humphrey says we should not always be looking for records. We need to see the changing trends that happen for longer periods.

FLOODS IN CANADA
Meanwhile, thousands of people had to abandon their homes in Ontario and Quebec Canada. But that won’t stop the Canadian Government in their crazy buy-out of a pipeline from the tar sands to Vancouver, or the so-called Canada East line. It seems we just can’t stop building fossil-fuel infrastructure, even as our population gets flooded out, burned out, or just dies in the heat.

CARBON DIOXIDE LEVELS
Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are hovering around 414ppm, literally off the charts. And that’s just CO2—it doesn’t count the stronger greenhouse gases like methane and nitrous dioxide. Where do you expect the CO2 level to go and what does this really mean Nick?

On top of flooded coastal mega-cities and food failures, our descendants will have to face climate refugees on a scale we can barely imagine. Nothing in human recorded history compares with the fast-arriving future.

FOOD AND BILL MCKIBBEN’S “FALTER”
Bill McKibben is usually a little bit hopeful. But his new book “FALTER: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?” predicts food-system collapse. I said the same thing a couple of weeks ago: We should be ready to feed ourselves if the global food trade system breaks down during the climate shift.

McKibben even seems to suggest humans may not make it out of climate change, if we don’t make monumental changes to our whole system starting yesterday. Do you think there is a chance of human extinction, where we join the other disappearing species?

I wish we had a Nick Humphrey reporting from Russia. The government there is not supportive of climate change journalism. Many of the extreme climate threats hitting North America are trashing Russia as well. We just don’t hear about weird weather from Siberia to Moscow. We need a truly global weather report that includes climate disruption.

AFRICA CYCLONES
A second major cyclone hit the coast of East Africa. It may take years to rebuild Zambia and Mozambique. Tropical Cyclone Kenneth in late April destroyed around 3500 homes plus roads, power lines, & farms. Kenneth struck just a couple of weeks after Cyclone Idai, the giant that wrecked parts of Mozambique, Malawi & Zimbabwe.

SINKING CITIES
Jakarta is sinking, and Dhaka in Bangladesh, Lumberton, South Carolina, Italy’s Venice, and Rotterdam in the Netherlands, and the whole New England coast. “The Sinking Cities Project” has a photo and video exhibition traveling around the world. Rising seas will not be reported first by climatologists. It will be reported as “weather”, as storm surge smashes ashore, as salt water replaces the ground water. Nick Humphrey will be on the front lines of that reporting.