The Week Climate Changed Everything

Wildfires are sweeping through drought-addled Southern California, a massive ice sheet that holds 10 feet worth of sea level rise is resigned to thaw in Antarctica, and top military officials are warning that rising temperatures are leading to global conflict. What else do you need? If climate change were a disease, it'd be thick in the bloodstream, and the symptoms of our carbon-stuffed atmosphere are being felt by Americans every day.

Just last week, the White House unveiled a deeply researched scientific work that outlined the many ways that global warming is already impacting the nation. This week, we lived them.

"It is pretty amazing to see these in May," the San Diego Fire Chief Javier Mainer told NBC. "We certainly have seen climate change and the impact of climate change." The state was stuck in extreme drought; the governor declared an emergency; something called firenadoes blew through the South.

Just days before, NASA scientists and preeminent glaciologists watched with horror as a massive ice sheet collapsed in Antarctica, consigning the world to 10 feet of sea level rise.

“This is really happening,” Thomas P. Wagner, who runs NASA’s programs on polar ice, told the New York Times. “There’s nothing to stop it now."

Soon after that, over a dozen top military officials released a report that explained how serious a threat climate change poses to national security. It was endorsed by former chiefs of the Department of Homeland Security and the CIA. It found that "climate change impacts are already accelerating instability in vulnerable areas of the world and are serving as catalysts for conflict." Global warming represents a clear and present threat to both vulnerable populations, and to American troops, it states.

“In the past, the thinking was that climate change multiplied the significance of a situation,” Gen. Charles F. Wald, of the Air Force, told the Times. “Now we’re saying it’s going to be a direct cause of instability.”

Instability indeed. The day after I wrote up the glaciologists' findings that 10 feet of sea level rise was all but inevitable, a woman whose community was destroyed by Hurricane Sandy sent me this tweet:

@bcmerchant Safe and well. Read your article (& others) & realized that rebuilding will never be a possibility. Don't mess with Mother Nature

— melissa ✿ novak (@melissa_novak) May 15, 2014

The sentiment struck me as deeply sad, but stamped with a small note of hope, too. Novak's tweets reminded me of Joe Romm, the physicist-turned climate blogger. Romm first began investigating climate change so he could help inform his brother as to whether or not he should rebuild his home in the wake of Katrina—he reached a similar conclusion. Both had seen tragedy, considered nature and the scientific reality; and decided to forge on.

Precisely as I was reading those tweets, my fiance Corrina was having an anxious phone conversation with her parents, who live in Carlsbad, the epicenter for that day's wildfires.

"My understanding from Cal Fire is that we've seen twice the number of wildfire starts in the state of California as we typically see this time of year," Fire Chief Mainer had told NBC. "I'm perpetually nervous, as is every other fire service professional in Southern California. We live in a fire-prone environment here, but when things are this dry, and the humidity is this low, and the winds are blowing as we see here today, we're very very concerned."

So were Corrina's childhood friends, who were filming and posting pictures and video of walls of flame consuming homes mere blocks from where she grew up. Her parents were safe, but the threat was real, and pressing.

These disasters are unraveling lives. It seems like hyperbole to make the claim, but it's true; wildfires, heat waves, drought, glacier melt, and hurricanes are actively worse than they have been historically. It can feel like an overreaction, even reductionist, like we're all living some fictional retelling of a biblical cautionary tale. But the science is clear; we're living in changing climes. Obviously climate change itself didn't start those fires, and its influence on Hurricane Sandy is still being hotly debated. Yet there's little question—more and worse disasters like both are on the way.

In fact, Motherboard's own Michael Byrne reported on a study that found that there was a two-year lag between record heat and wildfires—"2012's Heat Means Bad Things for 2014's Fire Season," he wrote, presciently enough. Drought, heat, and wildfires are interconnected phenomena, and scientists are increasingly certain all will worsen as the globe warms. There's certainly an indisputable link between melting ice sheets and rising sea levels. And when all that comes to pass, nobody will be arguing with the military chiefs who say it drives conflict.

For now, though, the politicians are still arguing. Marco Rubio, a contender for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination, explained that contrary to 97 percent of working scientists, he doesn't believe climate change is caused by man. James Inhofe (R-OK), the Chairman of the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works, waved off the military report, scoffing to the New York Times that "There is no one in more pursuit of publicity than a retired military officer.” Lamar Smith, the leader of the House Science Committee, said the White House's climate report, which was compiled by hundreds of scientists, "stretched the truth."

I was furious, reading the remarks, still carrying the images and words and warnings in my half-empty gut. While the Republicans babble about nonexistent "pauses" and bogeyman hoaxes and "unsettled" science, the Americans they represent are knee-deep in a hostile, changing world. Civilians are losing their homes who might not have to. Firefighters and soldiers are risking life and limb in increasingly ugly environments, and our scientific community have never been more unified in a call for political action.

The White House doesn't always excel at articulating our most pressing threats, but this time, it was right on: We're driving the climate to change right now, and this is what it looks—and feels—like. This week was living proof.