If people can remember societally important acronyms like LGBTQ + and an older generation can’t get toxic advertising acronyms like LSMFT out of their brains (BTW - It stands for “Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco”) we might all want to start remembering WHDSF whenever the issue of climate change comes up.
WHDSF stands for ‘Wildfires, Heatwaves, Droughts, Storms and Floods,’ and is a handy way to remember the range of catastrophic change we’re going through. These are not all of the impacts from fossil fuel fired climate disruption of course (sea level rise and melting glaciers are two more that come to mind), but WHDSF are the most readily recognizable that scientists are able to measure in terms of growth, frequency and intensity.
They are the poster disasters when “extreme weather events,” make the news as they increasingly do. Which is not surprising given that the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration has confirmed that in 2023 there were 25 weather/climate disasters with losses exceeding a billion dollars just in the U.S. and just as of early November. That’s compared to an average of less than 6 per year in the 1990s that grew to 13 per year by the last decade (2010s).
The science is pretty basic if you “believe” in science. The burning of fossil fuels has raised atmospheric carbon dioxide, a major heat trapping greenhouse gas, from a pre-industrial level of 280 parts per million (ppm) to today’s 424 ppm and still rising, trapping ever more solar heat in earth’s atmosphere (and in the ocean) that would otherwise radiate back into space.
This explains why the last 10 years have been the hottest in human history with 2023 now slated to go down as the best ever for air conditioner unit sales. This past summer clearly reflected climate scientists’ decades of warning that if we didn’t act quickly, we’d transition from a dangerous to a catastrophic climate regime. Welcome to the age of WHDSF.
For more information on what’s not getting done fast enough, feel free to check out COP 28, the annual UN Climate Summit finishing up in the oil rich United Arab Emirates monarcy and its billionaire theme park, Dubai. It’s been presided over by Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, chief of the UAE’s national oil company who recently claimed there is ‘no science’ behind demands to phase out fossil fuels. Or, as Upton Sinclair wrote, ‘It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” “Voluntary” phase out language has just been added to this year’s COP language, though COPs a weird acronym in itself given that there’s no actual enforcement going on.
So, if the basic science is too hard to follow here’s a simple equation that gets to its heart: BP, EXXON, CO2, UAE and WTF equals WHDSF, also the need for a rapid transition from fossil fuel to a clean energy economy by, according to the best available science, ten years ago. Also, acronyms like WHDSF have particular appeal for Gen Z youth. That is why, next year when some high school student asks her buddy, ‘How’s Your Summer Going? they might reply;
‘Not Great.”
“Why Not?”
“You know, WHDSF.”
“I heard you’ve had some big H out there.”
“Actually W, H and D.”
“Well, you know what they say, ‘Wildfire sky in the morning, better take warning, Wildfire sky across the state, better evacuate, or, you know, if you’re Canadian, find something that rhymes with ‘province.’
David Helvarg is a writer, Executive Director of Blue Frontier, an ocean policy group and co-host of Rising Tide, the Ocean Podcast.
