My dad and I talk on the phone about once a week, and one of our standing topics is always the ocean and the surfing conditions. I grew up being in the ocean all the time–surfing and swimming–and I’ve experienced in real time how drastically the beach in my hometown has changed since I was about five years old (I’m 30 now). Dad’s noticed it too. Everything from swarms of stingrays, scores of Great Whites where they never used to go before, unusually warm waters, more frequent red tides and toxic algae blooms, marine mammals getting sick, and changes in the sandbars because of irregular weather–it’s unnerving as hell. A couple of months ago he told me, “I think it’s going to be an El Nino year.” We both knew what that meant. El Nino is a weather pattern from the tropical Pacific that makes the summers hotter, the water warmer, and the surf bigger (at least in California). The combination of an intense El Nino pattern with climate change has resulted in two of the hottest days on record–two days in a row. Climate scientists are spooked about this, to say the least.

Unprecedented heat breaks records: The Earth’s average temperature reached an all-time high on Monday, and then again on Tuesday, in what is shaping up to be a year of record-breaking heat. Monday’s global average temperature of 62.62 degrees Fahrenheit was exceeded Tuesday when it reached 62.92°F, according to the University of Maine’s Climate Change Institute. Bill McGuire, professor emeritus of geophysical climate hazards at University College London, called the back-to-back records “totally unprecedented and terrifying.”

2023 is likely to be the warmest year on record because of Niño: This will almost certainly be the warmest year on record, courtesy of [the] warming trend + large El Niño,” tweeted Michael Mann, director of the Center for Science Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania. “So we can expect [the] warmest month, warmest week, warmest day, and probably warmest hour.”

“This is not a milestone we should be celebrating,” climate scientist Friederike Otto of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at Britain’s Imperial College London told Reuters. “It’s a death sentence for people and ecosystems.”

We know that fossil fuels are to blame: Climate scientists say the extreme heat we are experiencing is just the beginning of what is to come if greenhouse gas emissions — primarily the result of burning fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas — are not eliminated. “The increasing heating of our planet caused by fossil fuel use is not unexpected — it was predicted already in the 19th century, after all,” climate scientist Stefan Rahmstorf at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research in Germany told the Associated Press. “But it is dangerous for us humans and for the ecosystems we depend on. We need to stop it fast.

[From Yahoo]

It’s tempting to default to despair and “oh well, we’re all going to die.” But I refuse to believe that, because, to paraphrase the author John Green, despair isn’t very motivating. And we are not the only ones who matter here. The whales and the wolves, the bees and the buffalo, the elephant and the eagle–they are relying on us to advocate for them, because Earth is their home too. The extreme heat we are experiencing is frightening on an instinctual level. But discipline is soluble in fear. Let fear motivate you, let grief motivate you, but don’t get stuck in it. Remember who benefits from us believing that there’s no hope and there’s no point in trying to move away from fossil fuels because we’ve done too much damage already. It’s not future generations, our wild animal kin, or the vulnerable or sick. It’s those jokers at the oil companies trying to keep the gravy train going for as long as possible, no matter what world-ending destruction lays in wait for everyone else. That’s who benefits from our feelings of despair and helplessness. I say, don’t let them win.

Photos credit: Yaroslav Shuraev, Jeremy Bishop and Jess Loiterton on Pexels