In this video by The YEARS Project, climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe provides a quick take on the relevance of the IPCC‘s 2030 goals and our progress towards those goals. She addresses a recurring question, “Is climate change going to kill us all in 10 years?”
This question stems from misunderstandings of the October 8, 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, which lays out how much we need to reduce pollution in order to avoid catastrophic climate change and irreversible damage.
“Is Climate Change Going To Kill Us All In 10 Years?” by The Years Project
In this video by The YEARS Project, leading ecologist Tom Swetnam sheds light on future fires by looking into the past. Swetnam uses dendrochronology, the use of tree rings to reconstruct and evaluate variations in past and present environments, to study the natural and cultural disturbances of forest ecosystems.
Tree rings are like time capsules. Each ring tells the story of a year in the tree’s life.
“Very small, narrow ring –drought year. Big fat, thick ring –wet year.”
–Tom Swetnam
Tom examines tree rings along with scars in fire-scarred trees to learn how fires have responded to climate changes in the past. Once Tom knows how climate affected trees in the past, he can then extrapolate how the environment will affect future fires.
“We began to see these really large high-severity fires beginning in the ’70s and ’80s–fires that were like more than 10,000, more than 20,000 acres. Then suddenly, in the late ’80s, we started seeing fires routinely in that size range. And then, since the droughts of 2000, 100,000-acre fires, 400,000-acre fires. Just last year, 500,000-acre fire.”
–Tom Swetnam
Swetnam discovered the following:
•Fires in the American West are now six times more destructive than they were just forty years ago
•Fire season is now nearly four months longer than it used to be.
•Some of today’s fires burn so hotly that they destroy the soil, preventing trees from growing back for thousands of years.
“The smoking gun is basically there. It’s getting hotter, getting dryer, and the fires are going right up along with that.”
–Tom Swetnam
Trees store vast amounts of carbon. When trees burn, the stored carbon releases into the atmosphere and further warms the climate. The warmer the climate, the higher the chance for monster fires.
“This is outside of the norm. To burn every living tree for five miles around. This is catastrophic. We’re starting to see fire behaving in ways that nobody has ever seen before. From our knowledge, with tree ring records and old historic photographs and old pioneer accounts, in these landscapes there’s just no evidence of huge fires burning big holes like that in these places anytime.”
“I really doubt that this place is coming back to forest for many, many, many lifetimes. So, if this continues for the next 20, 30, 50 years, probably could lose 50 percent of our forests.”
“And when we know that we have been the cause of this or at least a large part of the cause of this, then the responsibility, the feeling of responsibility, is even greater to do something.”
One-third of all global warming has been caused by just 20 companies, and now we know exactly who they are. Here’s what’s even worse: these companies have known their products created pollution that could change our global climate. In this installment of #BigOilKnew, The Years Project covers the timeline of climate change denial.
