Climate Crisis AM Edition 2/22/24 Pirates Could Attack Oil Tankers
Pirates may attack container ships and oil tankers after they leave the Red Sea to sail to the southern tip of Africa. These attacks could hurt tanker traffic and could also threaten the oil supply. This, in turn, would raise crude prices and affect global economics. The ships have left the Red Sea to avoid attacks by Houthi militia, which fire on the ships in the area. Pirates could now appear in the Gulf of Guinea, which borders Nigeria, Cameroon, and Ghana. Many of these ships also transit the Indian Ocean off Africa’s west coast that borders Somalia, which harbors pirates that have previously attacked commercial shipping. Arsenio Dominguez, secretary-general of the International Maritime Organization, should take precautionary measures. This could, in turn, stretch the thin US and UK naval defense of these ships.
More Flood Risk — Palm Beach and Tampa
Largest Wildfires —Canada Could Get Worse
A new study shows that Africa’s GDP could be cut by over 7% due to climate change. Crop revenue could drop by 30%. The paper titled “The Socioeconomic Impact of Climate Change in Developing Countries.” The authors wrote, “With declining crop yields due to climate change, a significant number of people in Africa will be at risk of severe hunger, malnutrition, and undernourishment. In Africa, more than 200 million people risk suffering from extreme hunger in the long term.” Over 50 million Africans could also be hit by water distress. This is another example of how climate change hurts the world’s poorest people and countries, which do not have access to capital to slow or reverse the problem.
Florida Is Sinking
Do rising seas threaten Florida businesses along the state’s coast? That question will be answered soon based on a $9 million grant to the Florida International University. According to the Miami Herald, “Florida International University plans to use that cash to fund a network of wells along the coast that could offer new insight into exactly how sea level rise is already changing the landscape underground — and what kind of threat the thousands of high rises along the coast could face.” The funders may want to save their money. Virtually every other study of the state’s coastal areas and flood plains shows that by 2050, ocean and Gulf waters will encroach on low-lying areas, costing residents and businesses tens of billions of dollars and driving them inland.
Massive wildfires will return to Chile again because of climate change. Recent fires killed 133 people and devoured tens of thousands of acres. The World Weather Attribution published a study. Among its conclusions, “To combine the different variables leading to high fire danger we compute the hot dry windy index (HDWI) that combines high temperatures, high wind speeds and low humidity. In this index, we find that the hot, dry and windy conditions that drove the wildfires of February 2024 are characterised as a 1 in 30-year event in today’s climate.” This is not unlike similar studies of wildfire-prone areas of the world, which include California and other Western states. Drought will persist, and electrical storms, humans, or utilities can cause fires which spread rapidly due to strong winds.
