1. The Climate Fix Needs to be Quick: Lessons from Extreme Weather Surges of the Early 21st Century
Channel: William H. Calvin
Date: 2021-05-25

“What’s the emergency?”  The creep in overheating that has been our focus for forty years is, by itself, rather slow to constitute a drop-everything-else emergency. It is overheating’s knock-on causes, which created a surge in five types of extreme weather between 2002 and 2010, that create the emergency as they will repeatedly crash the global economy and likely kill off any big projects to restore the earlier climate. 

That would likely be followed by a human population crash, one that could leave as many as 80 to 90% of humans dead, perhaps regionally, perhaps globally. The immediate cause of death would not often be overheating as such, but the usual four horsemen: famine, pandemics, resource wars, and civil wars that turn into genocides. 

The secondary climate knock-ons do not track global mean temperature. Indeed, all surged during a ten-year hiatus in the warming trend, when some claimed that global warming had stopped . 

Next week, I will finish part 1 by reviewing what the jet stream loops are thought to contribute to these extreme weather surges. 

Sixty years of hanging around a medical school picking up on how physicians think about closing windows of opportunity, is what I bring to this overview of the climate threat. 
It did give me a somewhat different take on our Climate Problem than that of the climate scientists’ standard emphasis on Emissions, which cause Overheating, and so we need to Diet via annual emissions reduction.

Re-stating the Climate Problem as Extreme Weather in this 1st talk is a bit scary, once you realize that climate action, if it is to be effective, needs to happen very quickly, before we are too weakened to do anything.

That leads me to three more talks on “What to do about it.” We have done big and quick projects before, such as the four-year Manhattan Project of world war two, the Man-on-the-Moon program of the 1960s, and the crash program for a vaccine in 2020. I will show a path to doing something big about these new climate threats. I’m not proposing a particular fix, but rather a path to a goal.