> A queue of ships waiting to use the canal has been growing in recent months amid a deep drought.
A key point of a lot of climate change projections have been that we will be encountering changes that are very hard to predict and plan for.
A key point of a lot of climate change projections have been that we will be encountering changes that are very hard to predict and plan for.
Climate change CAN impact availability of fresh water in the form of rain since warm air holds more moisture, but that's double edged - there's more evaporation from freshwater bodies as well, and the rain can be unpredictable and dangerous since some will be in the form of major storms dumping water nobody's equipped to store along with all the other storm damage.
Or is there something in particular that would make this connection into a disaster area if that flow got started?
The length of the canal is about 75 km, a few dozen cm across that distance would be on the order of 0.04 mm / meter, which is barely enough to make water flow in a particular direction.
You might even have to add a pumping system to the lock to ensure that it would fill up fast enough.
Ecologically, it's mainly about connecting the Atlantic and Pacific hydrologically. They're different temperatures, salinities, turbidities, etc.
Of course I'm not a subject matter expert on this, just wondering what options exist today that didn't before.
The Caribbean is facing seal level rise anyway if we don't find a way to reduce emissions. Again I'm not an expert on this subject, but it doesn't seem cut and dry that a canal would be an environmental disaster if it were possible to excavate.
Edit: Even I learned this[1] from this comment chain, so it seems to me like this isn't necessarily common knowledge.
2. Most of the sea level rise expected from conservative[1] projections of climate change will be hitting us decades and centuries from now. Sea levels have only risen by ~8 inches since 1900, but even if we stopped emitting carbon tomorrow, we would have another 3 feet to look forward to by 2100, and 4.5 more feet by 2200.
3. Storm surges[1], caused by stronger storms, caused by climate change can make low-lying coastal areas uninhabitable, without actually drowning them due to sea level rise.
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[1] Less conservative projections are dismissed out-of-hand as alarmist, but seem to provide a better roadmap for reality than fairy tales, like the 2C warming that the Paris Accord promised us.
[2] The sea level may have only gone up a few inches, but if an average worst-storm-of-the-year storm surge has gained a foot, it may be the difference between your house being fine, and having six inches of seawater in your living room for one day of every year.
Sea level rise, in itself, would not.
It's ice thats seeing the biggest declines. Freshwater is mostly just being redistributed.
It's also probably more in circulation. Way more. But it almost certainly also means that water will circulate through different places, making sure you have both catastrophic floods and droughts.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/05/03/science/earth...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2013/03/04/climate-ch...
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/06/220620152119.h...
https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/new-unexpected-shipping-r...
https://www.axios.com/2018/08/23/maersk-to-send-first-contai...
Is there any actual evidence that global warming increases droughts in central America? Or is this just another "every time a hurricane hits we blame it on global warming?"
It has long been known that drought is a major problem for the Panama Canal, and that climate change will increase the severity and occurrences of droughts. None of this is unexpected.
Droughts happen. This is a story not because of the drought but because of how busy the canal is and the cargo of the ship that paid to skip the line. It was time sensitive cargo.
So basically everything you said is wrong.
The IPCC model tells you that carbon forcing is going to give you a certain amount of global average temperature rise, but it isn't a detailed weather forecasting model that can say "Panama is going to become a desert on November 13th, 2023". If we want to know specific local effects we need to run other simulations based off the IPCC predictions. Many of these weren't done because it wasn't necessary. The IPCC model was already forecasting massive economic damage, that should be enough to scare politicians into doing something, right? :P
To be perfectly clear: there will always be gaps where someone can point to and say, "well, over here, we're not sure climate change is responsible yet". We will never have enough scientists to study absolutely every possible effect of climate change, even retroactively. In fact, this is part of why the response to climate change was and is so underwhelming. Fossil fuel companies poured billions of dollars into junk science to try and promote literally any possible alternative explanation, which left enough doubt to make politicians hesitate on the potentially risky move of moving away from carbon-generating fossil fuels[1].
The thing the average reader should take away is:
- We know global warming will be very, very bad for the majority of humanity, but...
- We don't know exactly who and where it will hurt the worst, and attributing specific weather events to global warming is difficult[2], but...
- Regardless of how fuzzy the evidence is, saying that any given weather event is "caused by climate change" is still a safe bet.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/01/business/economy/panama-c...
[1] To those shouting the words "nuclear fission" right now, I hear you. The fossil fuel companies also somehow brainwashed the German Greens and Greenpeace with similar bullshit, to the point where Germany is shutting off nuclear plants to replace with the dirtiest burning coal imaginable. Lignite balls.
[2] Like, Nobel Prize level research.
Ok, so there isn't exactly a Nobel Prize for meteorology, but physics is close enough.
No it's not. But in practice that sort of relation seems to have about a 10% chance of being an actual casual relationship.
> Regardless of how fuzzy the evidence is, saying that any given weather event is "caused by climate change" is still a safe bet.
When there is fuzzy evidence that X causes Y it is not safe to say "X causes Y" and I'm not willing to concede an exception to this when X = climate change.
Most climate change models are designed to try and predict certain events over others - i.e. sea level rise, overall temperature change, etc. It doesn't really make sense to expect the IPCC to produce a model that accurately predicts drought in Panama (and no one is claiming they have?).
There are a bunch of broad-stroke descriptions about climate change. Generalizations about what it may change. Those are what I invoked. We expect droughts to get worse. Specifically, though it's hard to say how or where or what, we should expect to see more 'rare' events (that are probably not 'rare' anymore but we kind of lack the data to check).
I guess I would ask you if you apply this level of skepticism to any other predictive practice. Pairing general predictions ("more drought") with targeted models (estimates for sea level rise) is a pretty common practice.