You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.
This saying is attributed to Abraham Lincoln.
This post is just a reminder that, in addition, you cannot fool the laws of physics any of the time.
Stuff’s melting. Is anyone surprised? Is anybody paying attention?
The full article is on the National Snow and Ice Data Center website:
https://nsidc.org/sea-ice-today/analyses/arctic-sea-ice-sets-record-low-maximum-2025
I don’t normally repeat the news, but I only just stumbled across the fact that Arctic sea ice hit a new low this year. It peaks right about this time every year, and this year’s peak extent is the lowest in the roughly 50-year record.
No surprise, given the underlying trend. The north polar ice cap has been shrinking slowly for about as long as there has been a satellite record of it.
The loss of reflective polar sea ice is an important positive feedback serving to accelerate the pace of global warming/climate change. It lowers Earth’s albedo. Dark open ocean absorbs more light energy than reflective white ice does.
If you don’t quite grasp why anyone should care about climate change, focus on a large net loss of arable North American land over the next century, as the climate changes. Less food. But with a growing world population. And while that’s happening here, that’ll be happening across the world, as the (soil of the) the continental interiors warms and dries in response to climate change.
People also lose track of how long additional C02 emissions affect the climate. The stuff coming out of your tailpipe will still be warming the earth centuries to millenia from now.
People forget about the two or three decade time lag in the global warming “pipeline”, due to the mass of the earth, relative to the small top-of-the-atmosphere energy imbalance. Even if a miracle were to happen today, and atmospheric C02 were to stabilize, we’ve got three decades of warming “in the pipeline” as the earth’s surface temperate slowly adjusts to the energy imbalance that today’s level of C02 is creating. That temperature increase is how nature restores the planet’s top-of-atmosphere energy balance.
And people forget how long energy-using devices last. The majority of today’s new cars will still be on the road 15 years from now. A new furnace? Maybe 20 years. A new house? Maybe a century. And for that entire century, a new house with natural gas heat will be pumping out tons of C02 per year. Year in, year out.
Did the Biden Administration push the electrification of transport? Sure did. That’s because a world in which we drive gas vehicles, as we do now, but that still looks like our current world, is a pipe dream. It’s not a feasible outcome. The only way to hold onto a world whose climate is as benign as the climate in which civilization has flourished is to halt the buildup of C02 in the atmosphere. Did the Biden administration push for more electrical transport than we seem to need right now? Sure did. Because “right now” isn’t the right time frame. Twenty years down the road, as today’s new cars are finally heading off to the scrap yard — twenty years of global warming in the future — look back and see how that modest push toward electrification looks then.
Global warming in your back yard: The northward migration of the USDA plant hardiness zones.
Source: Maps are from USDA. I added the line marking the boundary between hardiness zones 5 and 6.
Maybe the easiest way to see climate change happening in your lifetime is to pay attention the good old USDA plant hardiness zones. Every home gardener is at least passingly familiar with these, because these are a guide to what will and won’t overwinter in your climate. The zones represent 10-degree-F increments in the coldest likely wintertime temperature, and are simply based on the coldest observed temperature in an area over the previous 30 years of weather data. They get split into -a and -b halves, based on a 5F difference in coldest expected temperature.
In Zone 7b, for example, I should expect temperatures to go no lower than 5F. This past winter it hit 5F here, and that killed a rosemary bush that I’d been growing for the better part of a decade. Rosemary, I now find, is only hardy to USDA Zone 8. Which I have now proven the hard way.
Turns out, these every-day use USDA plant hardiness zones are extremely sensitive to global warming. I think that’s because they reflect the coldest wintertime temperature you should expect in an area. That coldest temperature will occur in winter, at night. And global warming has its strongest effects at night, and in winter.
So, even though global warming has done almost nothing to the U.S. so far, and certainly not much in terms of average US land temperature, the impact on minimum annual temperature — what determines the USDA hardiness zones — has been large enough to be easily visible.
On the maps above, the Zone 6 boundary moved north about 200 miles, in 33 years. That’s ballpark for all of the zones, on average, over this period, but the movement north is fastest in the center of the continent, away from the coasts.
In Northern Virginia, over the same period, Vienna moved from just inside Zone 6, to just inside Zone 7. Or, rather, the zones slid far enough north over three decades that one full zone slid past Vienna, VA in 33 years.
Same phenomenon.
But 6 miles a year is 600 miles a century. Project that out, and a century from now, Iowa ends up with the climate that west Texas has now. Just from that slow, 6-miles-a-year, northward migration of the climate zones under global warming.
Without too much exaggeration, let this continue, and today’s children will get to see the sagebrush desert of the U.S. Southwest take over the U.S. Midwest. Let it go two centuries, and the current climate of Mexico will occur at the Canadian border.
With everything you think that would imply for U.S. food production. Amber waves of grain? That’ll be just another obsolete concept.
Merely from allowing the current observed rate of change to go unchecked.
As a society, we seem to have become too stupid to survive.
Conclusion
If civilization survives, the Republican Party’s head-in-the-sand policy toward climate change will go down as the stupidest, most costly, and most damaging thing ever done by a political party. Wars included.
Except possibly for encouraging increased use of fossil fuels. That would be even stupider than doing nothing, at this time. But that also seems to be firmly embedded in the Republican agenda.
I can only hope that they are as effective at that as they were at helping U.S. coal miners. The promise to do that being central to Trump’s prior win.
Source: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
On global warming, I’ll have to listen to the Republican party parroting Russian disinformation for the rest of my life. Fact-free spin and bullshit seems to be their preferred fuel these days.
But I will die with the certain knowledge that if civilization survives, the stupidity of encouraging faster global warming will be universally recognized. By whatever portion of the population manages to survive the mass die-offs that will result from a world-wide reduction in arable land.
(As an afterthought, will the Arctic save us? No. Only if you live on a Mercator Projection. And only if you think you can grow crops without topsoil, as the last ice age scraped most of Arctic North America down to bedrock, and deposited that topsoil in the U.S. Midwest. (See Canadian Shield). Some fraction of the population will likely survive there under even the most extreme warming scenarios. But most citizens of the U.S., and the world, will have starved long before there’s any Arctic dividend to share.)
