Press Conference: The Climate Casino by Interfaith Center for Sustainable Development

Extreme Weather Chaos – Climate Casino

A Press Conference was hosted by Interfaith Center for Sustainable Development on 1 November 2021 at 2:15pm. The topic was the Climate Casino.

Description:

People around the world are living through absolute weather craziness, which is disrupting lives, work and workplaces, and homes; even entire towns, large cities, and entire regions.

Why is this happening? The cause is abrupt climate system change, which has caused climate casino chaos.

Many cities and regions around the planet are lucking out in this climate casino. Long duration torrential rains inevitably cause flooding, or long duration heat waves are causing droughts and misery. Turbo-charged storms are wreaking havoc, especially on and near coastlines.

Paul calls it weather weirding, weather wilding, and also weather whiplashing where we go from flood to drought back to flood, each swing setting a new record.

Extreme weather is increasing in frequency, severity, and duration around the planet. Extreme events are also occurring in regions they did not previously occur. I fully expect that this will severely restrain global food supplies within a decade, leading to surging prices and global famine.

The human root cause is fossil fuel subsidies, which pay for the bullets that are hitting us in the foot, and every other part of ourselves and society.

The proximate physical system cause is Arctic warming that is 4 to 5 times faster than the global average (not 2 times or 3 times, that is simply not true). This causes the jet streams to slow, and get wavier, and even get stuck in “blocking” patterns that cause all our crazy weather, in our climate casino.

Buckle down. Batten the hatches. We have pissed off the climate and weather equilibrium systems, and are in for a rough and wild ride.

Panelists:

Dr. Peter Carter
Peter is a medically-qualified doctor, with a background in environmental health policy. He is the director of the Climate Emergency Institute, as well as an IPCC Expert Reviewer and co-author of Unprecedented Crime: Climate Science Denial and Game Changers for Survival.

Paul Beckwith
Paul is a Climate System Scientist who has taught at the University of Ottawa in the Laboratory for Paleoclimatology, as well as at Carleton University. Paul is a well know climate educator on YouTube with over 1,000 videos pertaining to climate science.

Regina Valdez
Regina is a Climate Reality Program Director, Leader and Mentor based in New York city. She is also a GreenFaith Fellow and a LEED Green Associate.

Where:
Scottish Event Campus, SEC, NGO Press Conference room, PC-2 Durdle Door in the East Lomond Suite, Glasgow, Scotland
Extreme weather events were discussed; Flooding in Germany, Cyclones, Siberian wildfires, Extreme weather in the North America such as flooding in New York, Wildfires in California, and the Heat Domes in Canada.

What follows are short notes from this press conference. You may view the full video, below.

Dr Peter Carter:
IPCC report in August

unless there are immediate raplid and large scale reductions in Greenhouse gas emissions, limiting warming to 1.5° will be beyond reach

Ms. Espinosa (UNFCCC Secretariat)

“Overshooting the temperature goals will lead to a destabilised world and endless surffering – expecally among those who have least contributed to greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere.

The IPCC report showed that for practical purposes, we are at 1.5°. Stablilising at 1.5° is impossible now. We left this behind some time ago.

The Baseline:
Numbers are relevant to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution with an alleged baseline of 1750. This is not so. The numbers are relevant to
numbers for the period 880 and 1910. From 1750, there was an increase of .2 to .3° depending on which set of numbers you are looking at. When people report temperature increase, they do not give the baseline, so much of this is fooling around with numbers.

Why are we calling this “Climate Casino”?

Casino’s are places of bad luck and losers. There are very few winners at casino’s. And we have a casino with our weather, our climate, there is bad luck, there are very few winners with the climate and plenty of losers. So if a city, a town or a region has bad luck – or you have bad luck – you can lose your health, you can lose your business, you can lose your township, you can lose your entire region. Maybe you can get away with your life, maybe not.

We have other climate changes. In the atmosphere. The Jetstreams are shifting, we don’t have a stable climate anymore. The jetstreams are getting slower and more wavy. We are getting weather behaving wildly, and whiplashing. A perfect example of this whiplash effect is the Mississipi River in the US: One year there is record flooding and low traffic via the Mississippi which is about 25% of the US economy for shipping traffic. The next year there is record low levels in the Mississippi and the US Army Ordnance has to go in and dynamite rocks on the river floor in order to have the river deep enough to take international shipping traffic. The next year, there is record flooding again, exceeding the earlier flood levels, so this is an example of the whiplash effect of the unstable climate.

We can also look to the extreme weather and heat in Canada, in Ontario with the extreme heat, and then a cold snap when all the bugs are killed. There is a random effect in place in this climate casino.

Whewn you are in a casino, the house always wins. The question here, is “Who is the House” in this climate casino of destablised weather? The primary house in this climate casino is the fossil fuel industry. We privatise the profits and socialise the expenses. As it was shared earlier, the ones who contribute the least to this climate destabilisation are the ones who suffer the most, the poor. This is amoral on a standard that cannot be imagined.

The goal posts are moving all the time.

Dr Peter Carter

* there is an abrupt increase in carbon ppm
* there is an abupt increase in global temperatures
* this is the warmest period in the last 100,00 years

IPCC quote:

it is indisputable that human activities are causing climate change making extreme climate events, including heat waves, heavy rainfall, and droughts, more frequent and severe.

another IPCC quote

with every increment of global warming, changes get larger in regional mean temperature, precipitation, and soil moisture.

 

This chart is from the IMF, it shows the spending by nations on subsidising fossil fuels from 2015 up to 2021, and then annual projections beyond that to 2025. It shows a massive increase in global spending per GDP. The IMF tells that this has reached an absolute record of 5.9 trillion dollars per year.

Another explanation of the Climate Casino is these one in 100 year weather events, and the one in 1,000 year events that are starting to occur, three in the last ten years. We have destabilised the climate system, we have introduced the element of randomness. There are more intense storms, the sea level is rising. As these extreme events continue to occur, we become somewhat desensitised emotionally, and our emotional response to extrem events is less and less.

One situation is the Artic: we had an instance of the temperature within the Artic Circle was over 30° by celsius in the middle of summer. In British Columbia in one town it was very, very warm for three days, and it was 41.5° by celsius, and on the fourth day, there was a spark, and the whole town went up. Nothing survived. There is also an issue with the water temperature, it has been recorded at 33.5° and when it gets to 35°, water plant life and sea life begins to expire. So we get to the situation where areas like that become uninhabitable.

Going back to the notion of Climate Casino, where the house always wins in the casino: here, the house is the fossil fuel industry and unless we start the divestment process and remove resources from the fossil fuel industry, its going to be like a freight train out of control.