Science fiction heat – 09/23/2023 – Reinaldo José Lopes

The climatic bizarreness of the last few days reminds me of a scene from “American Gods”, a novel by the British author Neil Gaiman. Shadow, the book’s taciturn protagonist, has just moved to a small town in the American Midwest in the depths of winter and, as he tries to leave his house on foot to buy food and warmer clothes, he becomes increasingly frightened by the inclement weather. of the Cold. That seemed like something out of science fiction, Shadow thinks to himself: something out of narratives that imagined a “dark side” of the planet Mercury, cold because the Sun never showed its face there.

Shadow escapes from becoming a human popsicle thanks to the kindness of a local police officer, who gives him a ride. There is no indication that we will have the same luck when it comes to escaping our science fiction scenario with a changed signal. Anyone who thinks the heat that has been plaguing the country in recent days is normal needs to be shaken. “Wow, but now it’s all the fault of the climate crisis? It’s always been hot in Brazil”, these people will say.

I invite anyone who reads me to arm themselves with patience (I certainly need it) and try to understand with me why this type of objection, even if it seems to make sense, is fallacious or, at best, irrelevant, even if superficially true.

The climate system is a complicated, multifactorial business. Some factors on which it depends are astronomical and geological and only change significantly on a scale of many thousands or even millions of years. These are things like the coming and going of continents and the tilt of the Earth’s axis. It’s because of this second factor that, even in a much warmer world, winters will continue to happen (someone explain this to that genius Alexandre Garcia, because I’ve already given up trying).

Other factors can be much more specific: the intensity of volcanic eruptions can cool the Earth for one or two years, for example. The same effect had the particulate pollution emitted by “dirtier” industries in the Northern Hemisphere — one of the few negative effects of combating pollution was losing the heating buffer brought by these particles, which quickly disappeared when these industries became more regulated.

Halfway between very long-term and very short-term factors, we have cycles lasting a few years, such as the El Niño phenomena (blamed in part by the current planetary oven) and La Niña. We still simply have “noise” — natural variability that is difficult to attribute to any precise factor, but which can make things worse or better in unpredictable ways in the short term.

And we have, of course, carbon dioxide — a gas whose physical properties as a “blanket” for the atmosphere have been known, roughly speaking, since the 19th century. A gas whose concentration in the atmosphere has increased by 50% in two centuries, due to our fault. This type of increase, it is worth remembering, has never happened at such a speed before. And the carbon dioxide emitted now could continue to influence the temperature of the atmosphere for more than a century.

All of this means that whether or not you attribute the current outrageous temperatures to the climate emergency doesn’t make the slightest difference. One way or another, the system’s natural variability will continue to be pushed to the red side of the thermometer. Which means that situations like the one now will become more and more likely and severe — unless we act wisely.

Anyone who still denies this fact is a) covered up; b)crazy; c) scoundrel; or all of the above. These people need to remember that it is not possible to install air conditioning throughout the entire biosphere, no matter how much they think that the one in their home or office solves any problem.

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