At present, the trees of the Amazon take in a quarter of all the carbon absorbed by the planet’s forests each year. But in 2018, Jair Bolsonaro was elected president of Brazil promising to open the rain forest to development—which is to say, deforestation. How much damage can one person do to the planet? A group of Brazilian scientists has estimated that between 2021 and 2030, Bolsonaro’s deforestation would release the equivalent of 13.12 gigatons of carbon. Last year, the United States emitted about 5 gigatons. This means that this one policy would have between two and three times the annual carbon impact of the entire American economy, with all of its airplanes and automobiles and coal plants. The world’s worst emitter, by far, is China; the country was responsible for 9.1 gigatons of emissions in 2017. This means Bolsonaro’s policy is the equivalent of adding, if just for a year, a whole second China to the planet’s fossil fuel problem—and, on top of that, a whole second United States.
Globally, deforestation accounts for about 12 percent of carbon emissions, and forest fires produce as much as 25 percent. The ability of forest soils to absorb methane has fallen by 77 percent in just three decades, and some of those studying the rate of tropical deforestation believe it could deliver an additional 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming even if fossil fuel emissions immediately ceased.
Historically, the emissions rate from deforestation was even higher, with the clearing of woods and flattening of forests causing 30 percent of emissions from 1861 to 2000; until 1980, deforestation played a greater role in increases of hottest-day records than did direct greenhouse-gas emissions. There is a public health impact as welclass="underline" every square kilometer of deforestation produces twenty-seven additional cases of malaria, thanks to what is called “vector proliferation”—when the trees are cleared out, the bugs move in.
This is not simply a wildfire phenomenon; each climate threat promises to trigger similarly brutal cycles. The fires should be terrorizing enough, but it is the cascading chaos that reveals the true cruelty of climate change—it can upend and turn violently against us everything we have ever thought to be stable. Homes become weapons, roads become death traps, air becomes poison. And the idyllic mountain vistas around which generations of entrepreneurs and speculators have assembled entire resort communities become, themselves, indiscriminate killers—and are made, with each successive destabilizing event, only more likely to kill again.
Disasters No Longer Natural
Humans used to watch the weather to prophesy the future; going forward, we will see in its wrath the vengeance of the past. In a four-degree-warmer world, the earth’s ecosystem will boil with so many natural disasters that we will just start calling them “weather”: out-of-control typhoons and tornadoes and floods and droughts, the planet assaulted regularly with climate events that not so long ago destroyed whole civilizations. The strongest hurricanes will come more often, and we’ll have to invent new categories with which to describe them; tornadoes will strike much more frequently, and their trails of destruction could grow longer and wider. Hail rocks will quadruple in size.
Early naturalists talked often about “deep time”—the perception they had, contemplating the grandeur of this valley or that rock basin, of the profound slowness of nature. But the perspective changes when history accelerates. What lies in store for us is more like what aboriginal Australians, talking with Victorian anthropologists, called “dreamtime,” or “everywhen”: the semi-mythical experience of encountering, in the present moment, an out-of-time past, when ancestors, heroes, and demigods crowded an epic stage. You can find it already by watching footage of an iceberg collapsing into the sea—a feeling of history happening all at once.
It is. The summer of 2017, in the Northern Hemisphere, brought unprecedented extreme weather: three major hurricanes arising in quick succession in the Atlantic; the epic “500,000-year” rainfall of Hurricane Harvey, dropping on Houston a million gallons of water for nearly every single person in the entire state of Texas; the wildfires of California, nine thousand of them burning through more than a million acres, and those in icy Greenland, ten times bigger than those in 2014; the floods of South Asia, clearing 45 million from their homes.
Then the record-breaking summer of 2018 made 2017 seem positively idyllic. It brought an unheard-of global heat wave, with temperatures hitting 108 in Los Angeles, 122 in Pakistan, and 124 in Algeria. In the world’s oceans, six hurricanes and tropical storms appeared on the radars at once, including one, Typhoon Mangkhut, that hit the Philippines and then Hong Kong, killing nearly a hundred and wreaking a billion dollars in damages, and another, Hurricane Florence, which more than doubled the average annual rainfall in North Carolina, killing more than fifty and inflicting $17 billion worth of damage. There were wildfires in Sweden, all the way in the Arctic Circle, and across so much of the American West that half the continent was fighting through smoke, those fires ultimately burning close to 1.5 million acres. Parts of Yosemite National Park were closed, as were parts of Glacier National Park in Montana, where temperatures also topped 100. In 1850, the area had 150 glaciers; today, all but 26 are melted.
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By 2040, the summer of 2018 will likely seem normal. But extreme weather is not a matter of “normal”; it is what roars back at us from the ever-worsening fringe of climate events. This is among the scariest features of rapid climate change: not that it changes the everyday experience of the world, though it does that, and dramatically; but that it makes once-unthinkable outlier events much more common, and ushers whole new categories of disaster into the realm of the possible. Already, storms have doubled since 1980, according to the European Academies’ Science Advisory Council; and it is now estimated that New York City will suffer “500-year” floods once every twenty-five years. But sea-level rise is more dramatic elsewhere, which means that storm surges will be distributed unequally; in some places, storms on that scale will hit even more frequently. The result is a radically accelerated experience of extreme weather—what was once centuries’ worth of natural disaster compressed into just a decade or two. In the case of Hawaii’s East Island, which disappeared underwater during a single hurricane, into a day or two.
The climate effects on extreme precipitation events—often called deluges or even “rain bombs”—are even clearer than those on hurricanes, since the mechanism is about as straightforward as it gets: warmer air can hold more moisture than cooler air. Already, there are 40 percent more intense rainstorms in the United States than in the middle of the last century. In the Northeast, the figure is 71 percent. The very heaviest downfalls are today three-quarters heavier than they were in 1958, and only getting more so. The island of Kauai, in Hawaii, is one of the wettest places on Earth, and has in recent decades endured both tsunamis and hurricanes; when a climate-change-driven rain event hit in April 2018, it literally broke the rain gauges, and the National Weather Service had to offer a best-guess estimate: fifty inches of water in twenty-four hours.
When it comes to extreme weather, we are already living in unprecedented times. In America, the damages from quotidian thunderstorms—the unexceptional kind—have increased more than sevenfold since the 1980s. Power outages from storms have doubled just since 2003. When Hurricane Irma first emerged, it was with such intensity that some meteorologists proposed creating an entirely new category of hurricane for it—a Category 6. And then came Maria, rolling through the Caribbean and devastating a string of islands for the second time in a single week—two storms of such intensity that the islands might be prepared to endure them once a generation, or perhaps even less often. In Puerto Rico, Maria wiped out power and running water for much of the island for months, flooding its agricultural lands so fully that one farmer predicted the island wouldn’t produce any food for the next year.