Climate change is subtly making earth other worldly.

Climate change is subtly making earth other worldly.

Across the globe’s tropics right now, seven superstorms are swirling over oceans. Hurricane Florence is butting into the Carolinas on North America’s southeastern coast. Tropical storms Helene, Isaac, and Joyce are hovering over the Atlantic like jets stacked on approach to Charlotte. Tropical cyclone Barijat is breaking up as it makes landfall at the Gulf of Tonkin while the Philippines and the rest of southeast Asia girds itself for Super Typhoon Mangkhut. Which has already cut a swatch of destruction through the Philippines and even in  Hong Kong.

So, fine, sure, it’s hurricane season. Stormy weather, yes, but climatology said this was going to happen. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that science doesn’t know if a warming planet will have more hurricanes, but its assembled researchers do agree that what hurricanes happen will be worse. More intense wind, more rain, parked for longer over coastal cities unprepared for 100-year-storms that now come once every five years instead. Though looking at the trends, the last storms of this size were just last year. And hurricane season still has 3 months to go.




This is a fairly odd assumption because it seems to ignore the reasons why these areas become uninhabitable to humans, or conversely, assumes that animals which are evolved for niches, will somehow adapt faster than humans using technology. With large swaths becoming uninhabitable, the reason isn’t actually the weather. It is that the heat, even in humid climates, prevents animals including humans, from being able to control body temperature via radiating heat. You may be lulled into assuming this would be a boon for cold blooded animals but even desert dwellers have their limits.

Still, though, that’s not an uninhabitable Planet. In fact, the people who study the possibility of life on other worlds talk about grades of habitability—somewhere else might have even more diversity than Earth can currently support or could support. Though none have been found. “Using this astrobiological definition of habitability, climate change on Earth today is likely to affect how habitable our planet is. However, even the worst-case scenario won’t make the planet uninhabitable for all forms of life. That’s the positive part,” says Jack O’Malley-James, an astrobiologist at Cornell University. “The negative part is that what we’re doing to the planet is making it less suitable for our own survival. Human civilization has depended upon millennia of fairly stable and predictable climate conditions.” So cheer up, just like the extinction of the dinosaurs made room for mammals to evolve, who knows what could be around in 50 million years! It is certainly an optimistic point of view.




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