Our House is on Fire

 This was Greta Thunberg’s message to the World Economic Forum in 2019. In 2020 she came back to Davos to tell the world’s richest that the earth, our house, is still on fire and the world’s richest people are a bunch of climate pikers.

I find it tragically humous scientists have been warning us for decades our earth is warming dangerously fast.  It took a well-educated diminutive 17-year-old girl diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, who speaks directly and fluently in her second language, to get the message out.

Is the world on fire? Years ago, when I started reading about global warming, a scientist computed the amount of excess energy being trapped by man’s emitted greenhouse gasses. He hoped his comparison would get our attention. The heat trapped by greenhouse gasses was, he said, equivalent to two Hiroshima sized atomic bombs going off.

Today, two of the world’s most respected science organizations, NASA and NOAA, came together to give us an update. Using the data from 2005 to 2019, Norman Loeb (head of NASA’s CERES program), plus Gregory Johnson (head of NOAA’s ARGO program) jointly produced a heating earth report.

To give more authority to my column, I am including some science jargon. You will not hear these terms in the bar or read it on FaceBook. NASA uses a satellite program called CERES. CERES stands for “Clouds and Earth’s Radiant Energy Budget”. The Earth Radiant Budget is like checkbook budgeting. NASA, with its satellites, measures heat coming in and going out of the Earth’s atmospheric bank with CERES.

NOAA’s ARGO program uses a fleet of 3000 diving floats monitoring the world’s ocean temperature. Since the ocean absorbs 90% of excess trapped heat, measuring the increase of ocean temperature gives us heating data.

The peer-reviewed report was published in the American Geophysical Union’s journal, “Geophysical Research Letters”.

In short, NASA and NOAA teams, using independent measurement systems, came to the same conclusion. The heat trapped in the atmosphere and the oceans has DOUBLED from 2005 to 2019.

Returning to the “house on fire” metaphor, pretend it is your uninsured home, apartment, or trailer catching fire. You call the fire department. The red trucks roll up and the dutiful firefighters start laying water on the flames. Then, a few neighbors show up and start yelling, “Hey, don’t use so much water! We have to pay for that water!”

It is your family home with no chance to find or buy another in your or your kid’s or grandkid’s lifetime.

The world’s most powerful and richest nation is currently debating how much water (money) to put on the fire (global warming). Democrats, supported by scientific data, insist our grid and associated infrastructure must be electrified, modernized, and updated. This is the first step to put out the climate fire.

Republicans tell us the cost is too high and they will not tax the rich to do it. Since Republicans seem incapable of uttering the term “global warming”, nor “climate change”, logical discussion with a Republican is challenging. Instead of fixing the grid we have tragic gridlock.

“Our home is on fire” is Greta’s metaphor. Can we use accurate energy comparisons rather than a metaphor to give us a better understanding? Perhaps this is one: The amount of heat trapped by human emitted greenhouse gasses is equivalent to every person on earth continuously heating 20 tea kettles 24 hours a day seven days a week.

Or, back to the A-Bomb comparison; we are no longer detonating two atomic bombs. It is four. I deliberately failed to include the rate of exploding atomic bombs to emphasize rate. Is it four per year, per month, per day?  The rate is four per second.

Is it time to start funding the fire department?

Greta Thunberg, Stockholm, November 2018  “I was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, OCD and selective mutism. That basically means I only speak when I think it's necessary. Now is one of those moments.”

Even though most of us do not have Asperger’s Syndrome, OCD, and a selective mutism, are we capable of speaking up?

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